


Heaven Here

by fansofcollisions



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: (not in a sexual context), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Developing Relationship, Domestic Bliss, Episode: s01e25 This Side of Paradise, First Kiss, Gardening, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mind Manipulation, Post-Star Trek: Into Darkness, Sickfic, Wedding Planning, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-07-13 07:13:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 29
Words: 41,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16012928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fansofcollisions/pseuds/fansofcollisions
Summary: In the wake of a mission that spares his crew but leaves McCoy's mind muddled, Kirk orders the Enterprise back to Earth. All he's got at his disposal are three months of hastily-negotiated leave and a fevered hope that Georgia's countryside can do what he can't: bring Bones back to himself.





	1. Act 1 - Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this fic as a present for a friend of mine, but it took me over a year to finally complete it, ye gads. I'm so happy to finally start posting it! Updates should happen on Sunday and Wednesday, to give me enough time to do some last-minute proofing between chapters.
> 
> This story spins off from one of my favourite TOS episodes, This Side of Paradise (aka the sex-pollen-minus-the-sex episode), but it's set in the Kelvin timeline. Pretend the events of TSOP occurred for the reboot crew, and this picks up as a canon-divergent continuation of that. (It could probably be read as the original timeline as well, if you ignore any references to the Academy.) More broadly, it's set somewhere in between Into Darkness and Beyond.
> 
> For those who haven't seen the episode (or need a refresher): Enterprise and co. land on a planet called Omicron Ceti Three to check on a group of colonists who claim to have found a new Eden. Turns out the people there are infected by the spores of local plants that brainwash everyone into happy, doped up farmers. Naturally most of the crew gets infected, stages a mutiny, and beams down to the planet to join the colonists. In the end, Kirk discovers that strong negative emotions can break the infection (by antagonizing Spock till he's cured) and Spock designs a subsonic pulse that cures the rest of the crew.

* * *

 

_“I’ve heard that word a lot lately,” Kirk says. “Perfect. Everything’s perfect.”_

_McCoy smiles. “That’s right. That’s just what it is.”_

 

* * *

 

 

“I am fully in control of my faculties, Captain. You do not need to monitor me.”

Kirk’s eyes flicker between the empty transporter pad and his first officer’s rigid stance. “Forgive my caution, Spock, but considering the last few days I’d say it’s justified.”

“I appreciate the concern. However… unwarranted.”

“Well, good.”

A faint beep draws both their attentions to the transporter console.

“That’ll be the first group,” he says as Spock rounds the panel and pulls down the lever. The pad hums to life, its five empty circles replaced with a shower of sparks and the outline of vaguely humanoid features.  

In total, nine crew members materialize. Most are two to a spot, with one stunned or unconscious crewmate propped on the arm of the other. A red-shirted security officer stands watch on her own circle, but her phaser grip is loose, exhaustion written in her pale complexion and sloppy stance. Kirk bites back the instinct to tell her to straighten up, that she’s still got a job to do. The white stains on her collar and chest glare under the pad’s fading glow. He feels the chemical sting in his own eyes when he looks at them.

They can afford one security officer a little laxness. The danger was never really physical, anyway.

He rubs his hand against the beginnings of a bruise along his jawline, not yet bloomed but growing more sore by the minute. Not _primarily_ physical.

“Cargo Bay 4,” he says to her as she steps off the platform. Her crewmates follow, dragging their feet, or the feet of the people they carry. The rest march wearily to the door, but he grasps the officer’s arm as she passes, keeping his touch light. She freezes, allowing the rest to pass her into the hallway. “Take this,” he murmurs low enough not to carry, and presses a hypospray into her empty palm. “Keep them asleep until Dr. McCoy arrives.”

“Sir,” she nods. Her phaser grip tightens.

The fabric of her uniform is torn at the shoulder, twisted around the thorn of some scraggly branch. Kirk plucks it out and smiles, what he hopes is reassuringly. Her face reddens and she ducks her head.

“Sir, I-”

“Off you go.”

Group after group of exhausted crewmembers follows, each more bedraggled than the last. One ensign has a bloody nose, and the fingers gripping her arm are covered in scratches and coffee-stained with grit. A couple people still struggle against their crewmates, frozen in tableaus of violence under the transporter beam, and he’s grateful for Spock’s strength when it’s directed towards keeping an enraged engineer from lunging at the pad controls, rather than a well-aimed blow at Kirk’s jaw.

Spock’s subsonic transmitter hasn’t done the job perfectly, but at least they don’t have hundreds of violent people to contend with: by his count, less than 15 among the returned crew are still under the thrall of the spores. Still, it’s enough to deplete what rationed sedative they have left, and Kirk catches another officer and sends him on a search for more hypospray cartridges. The man returns sheepish and empty-handed. Seems Bones’ laboratory is meticulously organized, but not particularly well labeled. He starts doing the mental math of how many people are left unaccounted for, and searching his mind for a contingency plan once their last dosage is spent.

“Only 22 of the crew remain on Omicron Ceti Three.” Spock says, answering Kirk’s unasked question. He wonders, not for the first time, if Spock’s telepathy extends past the touch of fingertips. Or maybe he just has an expressive face – he’s been told so before.

Kirk clutches the hypospray and its few remaining ccs of melorazine as the next group materializes. From here on out, they’ll have to rely on less pleasant means of restraint until the cavalry arrives.

Speak of the devil.

Kirk’s face breaks into a relieved grin as he catches sight of a familiar brown swoop of hair in the electric cascade of the beam. “We’ve saved,” he says, and Spock doesn’t return his smile, but he thinks he’s relieved as well. At the very least, his shoulders lose a bit of their tightness.

Who knows? Maybe when it comes to his first officer, he’s picked up a little telepathy of his own.

“Our prodigal doctor returns,” he says, still smiling as he steps forward, but before he can make it two paces Sulu leaps off the pad and presses him back, his dark eyes flashing a wordless warning. Kirk lets himself be pushed.

At first glance, there’s nothing abnormal about Bones’ expression. His warm, relaxed grin is familiar after a job done right. That smile has been a balm Kirk’s come to treasure after grueling mission, over a tumbler of bourbon and inconsequential, easy talk. But the smile feels out of place here in the transporter room, too familiar for a shared space, with no alcohol to loosen McCoy’s lips from its usual stubborn frown or wry smirk.

Bones rocks on his heels. It’s a treacherous bounce Kirk has rarely seen since Academy days. “Captain,” he says, and the loose smile remains, and Kirk knows the next words will be lies. The tell is too obvious, too easy to spot after years of poker tutelage in underlit bars, and he knows McCoy’s ticks better than anyone. “I think that’s everyone.”

“There are still 16 Federation lifesigns on the planet.” When did Spock get so close? Kirk hadn’t heard him move, but he feels his reassuring weight as his back.

Bones betrays no guilt at being caught in the lie. If anything, his grin widens. “I didn’t see anyone else. But you must be right, Spock. You could never stand being anything else, could you?” The bite is there, but it’s a playful façade of his usual animosity. There’s nothing of substance behind the remark, like it’s nothing but muscle memory.

Sulu’s holster is empty, his phaser lost somewhere on the planet, but his hand hovers about his hip regardless. If Kirk had his own phaser, he doesn’t think he’d draw it. From a strategic standpoint, he doesn’t want to create an altercation by anticipating one. From a personal standpoint, he’s not sure he could fire on Bones, any more than he would have fired on Spock earlier in the day.

If Bones comes at him, he’s got backup. There’s no need to escalate.

“Shouldn’t we send a search party down to retrieve the rest of the crew?” McCoy’s words are reasoned, and if it weren’t for the eerie grin, almost believable.

“I think that would be wise,” he says, his own poker face not forgotten. “Spock will lead that team. I need you in Cargo Bay 4, Bones. Seems that subsonic pulse put some of the crew threw the ringer, and we’ve still got a few folks who haven’t shaken off the spores.”

“Of course, Jim. I’ll update you once I get a handle on the situation.”

Kirk spares a brief glance at Spock, and he prays whatever telepathy he possesses, it reaches him in this moment. Spock’s face is impassive as always, betraying no twitch of understanding. “Great, you do that,” he says, returning his gaze to Bones. “Dismissed.”

Bones barely passes Kirk by a few inches before Spock’s hand shoots out and grasps him about the neck. The freeze frame lasts only a moment before Bones crumples to the ground, Kirk’s hands too slow to stop his fall.

“Let’s get the rest of the crew aboard,” Spock suggests. Kirk stares at the ground where his friend lies. “Nurse Chapel is among those who haven’t returned. We could use her expertise, wouldn’t you agree?”

He nods, and watches as Sulu drags the limp body to the door.

Right. Straighten up. He’s still got a job to do.


	2. Act 1 - Chapter 2

Spock offers to make modifications to the subsonic pulse, citing a promising variation on the frequency profile, but Kirk turns down the proposal. In the last few days, there have been cases of heavy nausea reported all throughout the ship, along with sudden fainting spells and general malaise. Chapel swears that there isn’t any lasting neurological damage that she can find, but he’s not ready to subject his crew to another bout of untested sonic medication. At least, not with a certain doctor’s go-ahead. For the last few cases, they’ll go the safer route.

The whole ordeal – from arriving planetside for their routine inspection, to observing the strange behaviour of the colonists, to the discovery of the aggressive indigenous plant life and Spock’s infection, to the mass infection of the crew and their subsequent mutiny – lasted barely a day. Now, three days later, they’re still dealing with the fallout of the yet-unnamed spore attack of Omicron Ceti Three. Kirk hopes that if they teach this encounter in the Academy, they’ll make special note of how utterly unbelievable the missions of the Enterprise have become. A planet full of flowery plants whose sole purpose is to multiply and enslave other beings into blissed-out rural subservience? It’s got a sort of twisted logic from an evolutionary perspective – who benefits more from mindlessly happy farmers than plants, after all – but he’s still not sure his grandchildren would believe the story.

Kirk gathers the loved ones of those still infected in the cargo bay – friends, partners, shipmates – and tells them the cure he used on Spock. The looks on their faces are unanimously disbelieving, and he understands why. It sounds fantastical: inducing violent anger as a treatment for sheepish pastoral idealism. Still, as with the spores, there’s a twisted logic in the solution. It has a symmetry that jives with Kirk’s understanding of the universe. Everything balances back to center.

They do it in a set of vacant quarters, one at a time. He makes sure a security detail is present, but Kirk knows this is too personal to be forced to do in front of their captain. Instead he waits outside, and watches from across the hall as each pair emerges.

The first to exit is a young couple: cadets-turned-officers on their maiden voyager. The man openly weeps as he stumbles out, claw marks marring his pale cheeks. He clutches his wife’s waist like a lifeline. Her nails are bloody, but her eyes are finally clear.

He’d married them, two years into the mission. Kirk had never seen a woman more ecstatic for her husband, and he’d only just retained his decorum faced with their combined enthusiasm.  It’s been two more years since, and he’s never once heard of them fighting.

Kirk doesn’t ask what’s said behind closed doors, but the haunted eyes of those who emerge tell him enough. Those not infected look worse for wear than the ones they’ve cured, with anguished guilt the common expression between them. Not for the first time, he considers asking Starfleet about getting a ship’s counselor. He doesn’t know who’s meant to pick up the pieces of this mess.

At least there are only a few left now under the spell of the spores: those without close relations who know how to hit where it hurts, and those too stubbornly good to muster the anger required to break the thrall.

And somehow, in his own special category, McCoy is among them.

Kirk has him taken back to McCoy’s own quarters, separate from the rest. Spock offers to stay, because he rightly guesses Kirk will refuse a security detail, but Kirk sends him away too. He’s measured his strength tit for tat against McCoy’s, and he knows in a physical altercation he’ll come out on top. In truth? He’d risk his skin any day to preserve his friend’s dignity.

It’s fruitless. He tries every insult he can think of, jabs at the deepest corners, employs every confessed secret he’s accumulated in seven years of friendship, but it all rolls off McCoy like water. Bigotry had broken down Spock’s defences, with decades old racial insecurities the perfect chip in his armor. Kirk knew him well enough to know when to strike for maximum impact. He thought it was the same for Bones, who wears his emotions freely, who is quick to admit to his own misgivings, who Kirk knows more intimately than his own family.

Nothing he says breaks down McCoy’s resolve. Oh, he gets angry alright, but it’s an impatient anger, not the bone-deep rage that might have sent Spock’s fist through Kirk’s skull four days earlier. He only waits until Kirk finishes another approach, then asks again when he’ll be allowed to return to the surface.

“The colonists will need someone to do a final fitness assessment,” he chides, and the lie is so blatant it makes Kirk angry in turn. In the end, he’s the one shouting, spitting out every subject under the sun that might cut deep: McCoy’s age and career, the crewmembers he’s failed to save, even his divorce – the one subject Kirk’s never learned the full details of – and it drags nothing but the same response from him.

“Let me go back.”

Until finally, after Kirk’s throat is hoarse and his emotional reserves run dry, it becomes something else.

“Come back with me.”

The words are sugary sweet, a sentiment seductive in its familiarity. “You aren’t happy here, Jim. There’s too much on your shoulders, always has been. Why not take a rest here, get a feel for the land? Who knows, you might like it more than you think.” The lazy smile returns, and Kirk can almost feel the sun beating down on his face, staining his cheeks with the freshness of a new burn. He sees him and Bones, sitting on rocking chairs, watching the days go past, with no Starfleet to call, no weight of lives lost on his chest. An easy life.

He can’t want it, not like this, but every part of him is raw and his heart aches all the same.

Spock offers again to help, and he admits defeat and lets him try, though it wounds his pride more than he’d like to admit. The animosity between them might have a root, something deep enough to latch onto and pull McCoy back, but when Spock emerges, he only shakes his head solemnly.

His perfect hair is mussed. Spock isn’t the type for nervous fingers. Kirk doesn’t dare enquire.

\---

They can’t dally in dead space forever, and Starfleet starts breathing down his neck the moment they receive his debrief. The Enterprise has two days left before she’s due at Epsilon 4; any further delay is unacceptable. He spends every spare minute pouring over medical texts he doesn’t understand, until Starfleet’s final order arrives and he’s out of time.

Kirk authorizes their departure. They leave Omicron Ceti Three – and everything Sandoval tried to build – a blip on the horizon. He can’t help but notice that from a distance, the planet could have been the spitting image of Earth. It doesn’t really make the leaving any easier.

“You can’t do this.”

He never thought he’d ache for the vacant smile of the last week, but the manic wildness in McCoy’s eyes is enough to have him lusting for simpler times. “You have to take me back.”

“We’ve got a mission,” he says, trying and failing to be a picture of rationality, to treat McCoy like he’s not a drugged-up shell of himself. “You remember that.”

There’s sweat beading at the edge of McCoy’s greying hairline. It’s a new symptom. Every symptom is new now, because every other crew member is back to normal. Every single person, except the only one who might be able to suss out the cure for the last hopeless case. Kirk watches his hands for any shake that might spell a brimming seizure or an outburst, but the sinew is taught around clenched muscle, strong and resolved.

“Take me back.”

It would be easier to say that Bones never pleads, but he does, in his own fashion – he pleads, he cajoles, and he gets his way more often than not because more often than not, he’s right. It’s that forthrightness that keeps Kirk on his toes, keeps him thinking about the humanity of it all, the consequences of his actions. Spock’s more his go-to for cool reasoning, and if that’s all he’s got at the moment, he’ll take what he can get.

“Doctor, you are being irrational. You cannot expect us to leave you alone on that planet.”

“I wouldn’t be alone if Jim would see reason. Can’t you see that you’re killing him, Spock? You and Starfleet both. You’re sucking him dry.”

Kirk’s used up his own reserve of pleading, and his stock of anger is gone too. Between a ship to run and superiors questioning his every move and the rippling aftershocks of trauma hanging over the rest of the crew, his brain is in seven different places at once. Maybe if he could just _concentrate_ , he could figure this out, but he can’t afford to spend hours a day sitting at McCoy’s bedside, sifting the dregs of his mind for forgotten, intimate details that might chisel a path through the fog. After any other mission, it would be Bones who’d play the role of sounding bowl, tuning all his scattered thoughts to a calmer frequency, but he doesn’t even have that.

He stands in the corner and lets Spock do the talking. He’d be happy to dump everything on Spock at this point if he could. Let him handle the Federation bureaucrats, the crew rosters, the responsibility of getting everyone through the next mission alive. Let him just have a moment to _think_.

Thinking means going back to an empty room, and watching the empty stars, with empty glasses untouched below the counter. Somehow, he doubts that would bring him the peace of mind he’s seeking.

“Bones, there’s no point,” he says finally, interjecting overtop of whatever reason Spock was trying to infuse into the conversation. “We’ve already left, and we’re not going back.” He means the words to be antagonistic, one last effort to force a reaction, but the intent gets mislaid in a wave of exhaustion and his voice falls flat.

What he expects another bought of snarling and simpering. What he doesn’t expect is the sudden trembling in McCoy’s hands. He watches in shock as the tremors climb through his arms into his chest until his teeth are chattering in his clenched jaw.

The determined smile crumbles into something younger, and when he speaks, his voice catches in the middle.

 “Jim. Take me back. I can’t-”

Bones does plead, but never like this.

This time, when McCoy crumples he’s fast enough to catch him in his arms. The sweat has spread to his collarbone, clammy against Kirk’s hands, and muscles twitch and ripple beneath his skin in microcosms of pain. He mumbles a broken litany into Kirk’s neck, begging again and again to be returned to the spores’ grasp. Spock watches in silence.

This can’t be all they’re left with. It’s more than Kirk can take. It’s more than he’ll allow.

“…Ok. Ok.”

“Captain,” Spock warns.

“You’ll take me back,” McCoy exhales in broken relief. His hands are still shaking.

“ _Captain_ ,” Spock repeats.

 “It’s gonna to be ok, Bones. I’m taking you back. I’m taking you _home_.”


	3. Act 1 - Chapter 3

It takes a week of angry subspace communiques to convince Starfleet Command to let them abandon the current mission. They want the Enterprise to put in at Starbase 7 and pick up a relief doctor, leave McCoy to the barbaric knives of deep space doctors with three years of field experience to their combined names. He’s as comfortable with the thought as McCoy would be, and so he insists with twice the vigour until resolves are worn down and he’s given permission to transfer their cargo to the USS Plainsborough before setting the course home.

The journey drags on and on until all at once, it’s done. Earth’s a speck in the distance for less than a moment before it balloons and fills the entire viewscreen, its blue and white swirls so familiar that it aches to behold the sight. The whole bridge, Spock excepted, lets out a long-held sigh.

He goes to see McCoy in his quarters before they disembark. The place is in disarray. He’s never known McCoy to leave his blankets crumpled on the floor, but there they are, tossed with the remains of his drawers in the same heap. The cushions from his bed are arranged at the base of the small viewport, stacked into an incline just long enough for a single person to perch.

At the foot of the makeshift chair lie the only untouched adornments of the room: three beautiful, proud lilies. Their stalks reach halfway to the ceiling, crested with red and fuchsia plumes. They were a stroke of inspiration from Sulu, who plucked them from his carefully tended arboretum.

McCoy sits on the cushions, staring out the window at the continent of Africa as it drifts past, fingers dancing absentmindedly around a lily frond. His eyes are sunken in, papery skin drawn tight around the lines of his cheekbones. It’s not dehydration – half-empty water glasses are littered around the room – nor hunger – he’d never let a crewmember starve themselves. It must be tiredness, then, and Kirk can feel it in his own bones, the sort of weary hopelessness that settles down into marrow and presses against the skin. He’s tasted it during long nights studying for astrophysics finals, endured it over grueling missions and doomed diplomatic negotiations. Kirk has only really known it fully during the hours spent writing the report of a young crewmember’s death, the nights wasted longing to be back to a home that never really existed, the contemplation of four years and how nothing he’s done will prepare him for what’s next.

Bones was always best at reading it in his eyes. He’d send Kirk to bed with a kind word and a fifth of good whiskey, and the feeling always passed after a time. But he feels it again now, as though the two were one body, breathing the same shallow breaths. Only this time he’s got to be the one to hold out the glass.

“See anything familiar?” he says, sinking down onto the far edge of the cushions. He keeps his hands close.

He’s learned not to anticipate a response in the past few weeks. McCoy’s heavy sigh is more than he’d hoped for. The tinge of exasperation is enough like the friend he knew that he can’t help but let the hopeful spark in his heart flicker for just a moment.

“We’re going to get you to the best doctors, Bones,” he says earnestly, leaning as close as he dares. McCoy still smells clinical despite the mess, his hands scented from too many years of disinfectant bled down into the skin. Kirk knows the smell of death too well, and this isn’t it. The hopeful spark grows. “The best immunologists and radiologists- hell, horticulturists we’ve got. We’ll get you feeling like yourself again in no time.”

If the Federation’s top medical specialists can’t cure him, Kirk doesn’t know where else to look. Whatever remains preserved of the Vulcan archives in the Federation database has proved fruitless, and none of their other diplomatic allies have ventured to the Omicron sector. The spores that the crew carried onboard withered and died days after leaving the planet’s orbit, along with any fully grown plant specimens they collected for study, leaving nothing but black husks and dust. The only living spores aboard the ship are crawling around in McCoy’s bloodstream, and even they die when his blood is drawn from the body. Their tricorder technology is useless, verified by McCoy himself before this whole mess even took hold of him, and the most advanced scanning technology they have on the ship hasn’t shown much more than hormonal variation and exhaustion: symptoms, but no root cause.

If it were any other ship, he would have said that of course their equipment wasn’t up to the task: the technology on Earth, or even a Starbase, would be far better outfitted to find a diagnosis. But the Enterprise isn’t any ship. She’s the _flagship_ , Starfleet’s pride and joy, decked out with a medbay that rivals even the intra-solar-system colonies and the best staff in the whole damn fleet. Even without Bones at the helm they’ve got a team of doctors and nurses more than qualified for their positions. If he were confident someone at Starfleet Medical could do better, he would have requested them for his crew, and he would have gotten them.

Kirk stares down at his hands. The mask of surety he’s donned for the crew is slipping, he can feel it. He never needed to wear one before, with Bones. “You’re trying, aren’t you? To come back?”

He registers the shift in the cushions before he hears the words.

“Take me home.”

McCoy’s voice croaks like weathered wood, and Kirk’s head shoots up. McCoy is sitting straighter than he’s seen him in weeks, his eyes clear and bright. Kirk follows their gaze to the viewport.

Opening up before them is the long plane of the east coast of North America, its borders alight with daytime bustle, and seas of green flowing onwards into the vast world of the South and Midwest. Forests preserved in time by conservation and careful tending are dotted with chrome gleaming and blue water pathways to lakes and farmland, then onto mountains jutting into snowy peaks along the Appalachian trail. Even he is caught off guard by the moment, worries pulled apart into a homesickness he didn’t expect to feel so fiercely.

They breath in together, drinking the sight of what the journey’s cost them.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “Yeah, that I can do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nearly there :)
> 
> I'm going to be out of town on Wednesday, so time to see if I can use this drafts feature to queue up the next chapter... Don't want to start messing up my update schedule this early!


	4. Act 1 - Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally managed to post this after a long conference day. Thank you, drafts function! Now I can collapse on my hotel bed in guilt-free peace.

There are days of tests that stretch into a week, then two. Kirk spends the mornings in meetings and catching up with all the higher-ups he’d left Earth to avoid, and the nights in the ward at St. Stephen’s Hospital, fingers carefully avoiding the restraints that hold McCoy down to the blue sheets. The tears that prick at the corner of McCoy’s eyes still hurt to witness, but they’re a sign of something more than the spell of Omicron Ceti Three, a longing deeper than the chemical mist of the spores, and it’s what he’s holding on to.

“Take me home, Jim.”

“When you’re better, Bones. Then you can go home.”

There’s a part of him that wonders if he should visit Iowa, feel its rolling plains beneath his feet again. He could do it and be back for dinner, but it feels wrong with McCoy still strapped to a hospital bed. At least, that’s the excuse he gives himself.

The doctors don’t find anything in two weeks of searching. He’s told them all he knows, transferred the entirety of the Enterprise’s scanner logs from the expedition, but they still come to him with a detachment that makes his blood boil and say there’s nothing to be done. It’s possible the effect will wear down in time, but if it hasn’t weakened by this point it seems more likely the virus is self-replicating. Their only guess at why it’s still affecting McCoy when all others got better is some sort of mutation, though that too they have no direct evidence to support.

The official recommendation is long-term care with supervision, to ensure McCoy keeps eating and doesn’t try to hijack a shuttle and end up adrift in deep space. There are any number of excellent facilities, or outpatient care providers if that’s a preferable option. The only next of kin listed on Bones’ records is a sister, but she’s out in the Vega colonies with her son and can’t be reached, and besides, Kirk doesn’t think they’ve spoken for years. At least, McCoy has barely spoken of them. Not for the first time, he wishes he’d pressed deeper, known more. How many conversations had they left unsaid?

As captain, Kirk is duty bound to serve many roles for his crew – chaplain, judge, diplomat, counselor. This is the first time he’s ever served as medical proxy. The decision is a choice between evil and greater evil, and he wants someone else to make it. He’s had to choose who dies before, but choosing how someone will live is somehow so much worse. There’s nothing to compartmentalize here: his choice is what McCoy will live with for years, even decades if it takes that long to find a cure, and he’ll never be able to escape from it any more than Bones will. The worst part of it all, the part that’s hardest to stomach? Kirk will be gone, spirited away by the Enterprise, and Bones will just be… here.

“Take me home, Jim.”

“I need time to think.”

Kirk won’t condemn him to live in a hospital, no matter how pretty and diverse the long-term care facility, no matter how they doll it up, call it community living, sweeten the scent of decay with flowers and a view of the water – not when McCoy’s surgeon hands are left impotent in their place of significance, the caretaker becoming the cared for under less skilled fingers. It’s a non-option.

The interviews for live-in companions are taxing. All the candidates are highly qualified – over-qualified, if he’s being honest, but he’s got favours he can pull for half the senior staff at the Academy. It’s worth a few interviews and a promise to keep a promising young cadet in mind for a petty-officer position to get the best. And the best, he gets. Each candidate is more professional, courteous and patient than the last: the pride of their profession.

There’s no doubt in his mind that McCoy will hate every last one of them.

The admirals are getting antsy. They want the Enterprise to depart as soon as possible – the ship is behind schedule, even with the Plainsborough covering their most recent duties.

Kirk’s already put in for McCoy’s replacement.

He’s heartbroken, but he’s not an idiot. They’ll need another ship’s surgeon before the Enterprise can leave spacedock. Kirk hasn’t met Starfleet’s favoured candidate, but he hears she’s more than competent from people he trusts to know, and that’ll have to be enough for the moment. That’s more than he knew about his crew when he started. Bones had really been the only sure thing.

He hits the time limit, and he’s called into an impersonal office and told to pack his things and hit the celestial road. The Enterprise will leave dock tomorrow at 0800, with or without him. He nods, and replies that he understands.

He packs the things he brought from the ship, then returns to St. Stephen’s and tells the attendants his decision.

McCoy is dozing in a chair when he enters the room. They’ve removed the restraints, apparently satisfied he’s no longer a flight risk. Asleep, he looks just like he did 5 years ago, passed out with a medical textbook hanging from his lap, and Kirk’s heart pangs uncomfortably. There was a time when both of them would pass out like this, and complain about sore backs in the morning, laugh about the awkward positions they’d fallen into. He would make Bones make him coffee because he had a nice French press and it beat any replicator sludge on campus, and they’d hobble to class with nothing but caffeine sloshing in their stomachs.

 It’s been a long time since they’ve fallen asleep side by side.

He kneels and puts his hand on McCoy’s knee.

“Bones.”

McCoy wakes slowly, tired eyes bleary in the fading light from the window.

“Bones, it’s time to go home.”

His eyes widen, and he presses forward in the chair. “Jim,” he says urgently.

“I’m serious. Sulu packed up some of your things, he beame-”

“Jim,” McCoy repeats, and Kirk shuts up. “ _Come with me_.”

Kirk takes a deep breath. This is his specialty: making terrible, impulsive decisions. Why break the mold now?

“I’m coming with you.”

McCoy’s face splits into a grin too wide for the sterile realm of the hospital room and Kirk basks in it, lets himself believe for just a moment that this is his friend, and that he’s the reason for the smile. That there’s nothing else in the universe that matters more, in this moment, than them.


	5. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before we begin in earnest, a look back.

_Girls don’t take to Kirk hanging around their rooms, he discovers early on in his first year at the Academy. He tried with the first few, but they needed him out before their roommates got wise to the intrusion, or didn’t want to risk a black mark from an RA for the sake of a few extra minutes of cuddling. Being tossed out half-dressed isn’t his favourite way to end an evening – they don’t call it the walk of shame for nothing – and so he’s learned to toss himself out first. At least then he gets time to pull on his boots before he ends up stepping into something sticky and unidentifiable in the twilight gloom._

_His own roommate is an upperclassman, none too happy to be bunking with a freshman, and even less receptive to a shivering, slightly tipsy cadet stumbling in at 0400, no matter how discretely he attempts to unlock the door. That’s another thing he’s learned the hard way. Being tossed out once stings. Being tossed out twice means dozing on a bench in the garden while keeping an ear open for roving security bots. He gets caught the second time this happens and receives an official reprimand._

_The time after that, he finds himself guiltily knocking on McCoy’s door._

_McCoy is technically the same rank as Kirk – everyone begins as a lowly cadet – but unlike Kirk, he came into the Academy with a medical degree under his belt. While that doesn’t earn him an automatic promotion, it does afford him certain privileges. As a mature student, he has access to upper-level courses, preference for practical training assignments and, most importantly: single-occupancy housing._

_McCoy’s apartment is not much more than a modified double room, but in place of the second bed there’s a couch and a small table, and Kirk would be grateful for the floor at this point. After a small amount of half-hearted snarling McCoy lets him bunk down on the couch with a spare blanket. They’ve known each other a month. Kirk’s not sure how far he can push the favour, and he sneaks out before McCoy awakes, spending the morning lounging around the now-open library until he’s sure his roommate has left for class._

_The second time it happens, McCoy fixes Kirk with a murderous glance and when he raises his hand, Kirk knows he’s finally pushed his luck too far. He braces to fight, or to run. He’s got experience dealing with angry older men, knows his options. But McCoy wordlessly grabs his wrist and drags him back into the hallway, and Kirk lets him. “If you ever knock on my door before the sun’s up again, you’ll wish you were never born.” Kirk nods his head, tries to apologize, tries to subtly pull his hand loose. Run, this time._

_Thrown out three times in a night. That’s gotta be a record._

_McCoy pulls up the panel by the doorframe and shoves Kirk’s hand onto it. In a moment, his prints are entered into the scanner. A quiet_ ping _confirms that he’s been authorized by the system. “There. VIP access. Now go to sleep.”_

_Then the same blanket at before is being tossed at his disbelieving face, and sleep comes slowly as he stares at the bed where his saviour’s breath is evening out, still not entirely sure what’s happened._

_His silent alarm vibrates at 0600. Time to blow this joint before he overstays his welcome. He’s barely managed to pull on his boots before he notices McCoy staring at him blearily from his own bed. “…the hell did I say about going to sleep?” he murmurs in a gravelly, tired voice. Kirk reddens, embarrassed in a way that’s hard to pin down but McCoy’s dropped back off before he can say a word. He keeps still a moment, then five, before reaching down to slide his boots back off._

_To his surprise, sleep returns easily after that._

_They walk to class together, the morning after, two identical travel mugs of piping hot French press in their hands, and when it inevitably happens again the door opens for his fingerprint, and there’s a blanket slung across the back of the couch, nonchalantly, as though it was always meant to be there._

_McCoy’s apartment is where they study, now, and where they chat. And apparently, the only place Kirk can guarantee a good night’s rest. It’s nice, sometimes, to wake up to the face of someone who doesn’t actively hate his guts._

_“Did you_ seriously _drink the last of the dark roast?!”_

_Most of the time, anyway._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ended up being maybe my second favourite chapter of this whole story, though it's short: it helped me a lot to clarify Kirk's perspective going forward. I actually wrote it as part of a chapter much later in Act 2, but after I finished the act and went back to edit, it was clear it belonged right here.


	6. Act 2 - Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arg, sorry all! This was supposed to go up yesterday, but I got dragged to dinner by my work team (which always seems to take 3 hours minimum) and basically collapsed the moment I got home. It's a little longer chapter this time around, so hopefully that makes up for the delay!

The house in the clearing is old wood, white-washed too many times to tell what colour lies at the base. Its pillars are a skeleton of bleached whale bones, bowed eaves hung with cobwebs and cracked along the edges, exposing veins of dark chestnut beneath the paint. The walls are guarded by the branches of stately oaks and sugar maples, leaves lit with hues of mint and moss in the shifting light of morning, branches overgrown and entwined and poking at the holes in the sideboards. Every few minutes a chipmunk darts out from beneath the porch to investigate the approaching intruders, then retreats back to a nest hidden beneath.

Each step past the threshold of the clearing crackles with dry leaves and twigs, the sound echoing too loud in the crisp silence. The air tastes like the dust kicked up by boots and goes down cold into the lungs.

Kirk drops his bag and collapses onto an abandoned bench that faces the house, its iron legs wrapped by strands of linden and pearl moss. He takes a moment to catch his breath, but McCoy keeps moving forward, his feet propelled by singular purpose, until his outstretched fingertips can reach the banister of the porch. He grasps the rail and begins to pull himself over. Kirk is almost sure the frame will crack and collapse under his weight, but the wood holds firm.

Kirk watches as McCoy wanders the porch, ghosting the edge of its contents with his hand. An old rocking swing with yellowed paisley cushions drifts gently at his touch. McCoy’s fingers dip into the crevasses of an old chest that lies near the steps, painted with an inset of tulips and vines, its pattern somehow untouched by weathering and age. He watches the tension in McCoy’s shoulders lift, his expression bloom, his feet lighten as though he might lift up and float past the balcony. 10 years fall away – 5 for the years he’d gained in the past month, another 5 for the time they’ve been away – and suddenly Kirk is met with a face he doesn’t recognize. The shape is still the same, but the lightness there is untouched, lacking the grimness of the man he met in a shuttle all those years ago. The house too comes alive under a reverent eye, and what seemed broken beyond repair in its frame looks almost fixable the longer Kirk stares.

“We’re home,” McCoy says, and he feels the truth in the words.

“Yeah,” Kirk says. “This is something.”

\---

He’d put in for some housing in a larger town, a nice bungalow near a river, still close enough to teleporter access to get back to San Francisco quickly if needed. There was barely a discussion. McCoy had insisted they instead travel to his grandmother’s old homestead, nestled deep in the Georgian south. Its main neighbours were acres of abandoned farmland, dotted with pockets of subsistence agriculture and the occasional small town – a relic of another time, preserved only by those who cared enough not to let the tradition die. 

On the walk over from the nearest town, he’d begun to understand why McCoy was so insistent. The fields, though scraggly and unmaintained from being left to their own devices, held a sort of rustic charm that Kirk thought had passed with the advent of the agricultural revolution, replaced with miles of solar greenhouses that could produce all year round. The nostalgia of it all was enough to remind him of the wildernesses of Iowa, even if they didn’t quite match the scale of the untamed South.

They walked four miles to get to the house, but he’d have been happy to walk another four just to see how far the fields extended, to tell if the tattered corn went on forever, or if he walked far enough, the mountains on the horizon would rise up beneath his feet.

“I’m glad you’re here, Jim.” McCoy smiles at him from across the empty kitchen table. The sun, now high and warm, spills through the curtains and cuts a shining line across the table, dividing the space between them.

“Well, Starfleet owed me about three months of back leave. Guess this is me finally taking that vacation you always said I needed.” He scratches nervously at the itch on the back of his neck. At first he thinks it’s an insect’s nip, but his hand comes away clammy, and he realizes it’s the sting of sweat. The breeze through the open panes isn’t enough to dull the steadily rising temperature. Spring hasn’t yet given way to the full heat of summer, but it’s teasing what’s to come. “And this gives Spock a chance to spread his wings.”

McCoy snorts. “He’ll crash the ship under the weight of regulations in a week.”

“He promised to bring her back in one piece, and I’m holding him to it. Right now I’m more worried about feeding _us_.”

This is an immediate problem, one with a finite number of solutions. One foot in front of the other, one crisis at a time. And as crises go, his rumbling stomach feels manageable – more manageable than staring at the man seated across from him and wondering what’s going on in his head. He can worry about the rest later.

Kirk glances around the kitchen. The stove is a wood-burner, another relic he’d never expected to see outside a museum. Its handles and sides are covered in grime and he’s not convinced he’ll be able to operate it without McCoy’s help. At least there’s a functioning cooling unit, and a portable generator to power the lights and water that he’s _almost_ sure he has the technical know-how to get up and running again. None of that solves the problem at hand, however. “It’s a long walk back to town.”

“The land will provide more than you think.” McCoy leans back, ignoring Kirk’s skeptical look. “Always has before. Think about it - for centuries of human development, there was nothing but the land, and human determination to shape it. Plants, crops - everything moved at its own pace. No transporters whipping our molecules around, just good solid earth beneath your feet. ‘Nothing good comes out of moving quicker than the ground below you.’”

“Sounds like a saying.”

“You’d be right about that. I would have thought it was etched into the walls by now.”

“Something your grandmother used to say?”

McCoy’s smile wavers a moment.

“She… she was a wonderful woman.” He clears his throat. “My grandma…” He turns towards the window past the gnarled trunk of an oak, not vacant like he was staring out the viewport again, but troubled by some unseen ghost. “She’s buried out there, past the creek, close as we could find to her husband’s grave.” Kirk shivers, not quite sure what to say. He’d offer condolences, but he’s heard enough of them himself to know they’re usually not worth the breath.

The shadow passes, and McCoy turns back to him with a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye. “She taught me to shuck peas at this very table. Also showed me how to stuff a pipe, and how to mix a mean old-fashioned. Maybe that wasn’t appropriate for a boy my age, but I think you’ll agree it’s served me well in later life.”

Kirk can picture it: young McCoy sprawled in the same chair where he sits now, picking at a chip in the varnish with blunt fingernails. The phantom child pouts and grumbles as a kettle of peas is placed before him, with the allure of sunshine compelling him out of the chair and the warmth of fire and family keeping him still. He wonders if McCoy was a rebellious child, or if he was on the straight and narrow. Both thoughts are endearing.

“How long did you live here?” he asks, but the real McCoy is up and about and doesn’t hear him, too busy clanging with the line of pots suspended from a strange mechanical contraption attached to the ceiling. Kirk can’t make heads or tails of the mechanism from this vantage, so he stands to get a closer look.

“We’ll have to season these if we’re going to use them.” McCoy draws a rack down. A counterbalance raises a good three feet out of a bucket by the door as the gears turn. Now hanging at chest level, McCoy raps on a saucepan with his knuckles. The dark thud melts into the walls.

“Those look older than Solomon. Sure they’re still fire-worthy?”

“Clearly you don’t know about good Southern cooking. These are 150-year-old cast iron, passed down through generations. And, like a good brandy, they only get better with age.” McCoy mimes raising a glass. “Speaking of which…”

He gently guides the rack to its former height, and the counterbalance returns to its place in the bucket.

Kirk almost expects him to kneel pull up a floor board to reveal a stash of fine liquor, elegant in antiquity, but McCoy heads instead to the pantry cupboard and rustles around in its recesses. Finally, he draws forth a single murky bottle, with a cream and crimson label not yet cracked with age, and places it in the centre of the table.

McCoy ventures around the corner into the dining room, leaving Kirk to ponder the bottle. The label strikes him as homemade: the calligraphy is too imprecise to be mass produced, even if the aim were a sort of counterfeit nostalgia.

_Blackfield Cordial_

Did his grandmother bottle her own liquor? If so, that’s the kind of grandmother he’d have liked to meet.

When McCoy returns, he produces two mercifully clean crystal liqueur glasses and sets them on the table. He takes the bottle from Kirk’s hands and when he cracks the seal, the unmistakable aroma of peaches drifts out onto the breeze.

Kirk accepts his small glass and sniffs at the drink. The scent is sweet, but not in an artificial, syrupy way – and there’s an acidity there that makes his nostrils flare, and a freshness like clear rainwater. The fruity taste coats his tongue before the glass has even touched his lips.

He raises a toast, watching McCoy’s face as they both drink. He seems contented, his eyes resting catlike as he leans back in his chair and puts a boot onto the table. If Kirk didn’t know better, it would be easy to assume this was just a man happy to be back on familiar ground, glad to bask in the afterglow of a pleasant taste. There’s nothing blatantly unnatural in his pose or his expression. It’s the type of ease Kirk has only caught rare glimpses of in all their years of friendship.

He wouldn’t describe Bones as an… anxious man, persay, or even a particularly serious one. But truly contented? Never. There was always an undercurrent of worry there, an element of caution drawing his shoulders back and his brow to a crease.

If there was any hell of an incurable prognosis he could have wished on a friend, eternal contentedness should be the least of all evils. They should all be so lucky to see the people they care about suffer that kind of fate, if they have to suffer. But it doesn’t make it any easier to watch McCoy’s face and wonder if this, too, is a false nostalgia – sweet and cloying, and lacking substance.

“Good?”

He swallows, and nods.

“Very.”

He takes another sip.

The aftertaste comes off bitter.


	7. Act 2 - Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe I almost forgot to post AGAIN. Just in time! (At least if that time is PST :))

It takes a full day to clean out enough rooms to make the place liveable. To clean every room would take weeks – each time he thinks he’s found the last, he turns a corner and finds another hallway with another bedroom or vanity. It truly is a manor house in the traditional sense, and it would be easy see a whole family living here, with seven children in poofy dresses and stockings and curls underfoot, if only there were more decorations.

The house needs frills and lace, splendid paintings and ornamental rugs to live up to its grandeur. Instead, most of the rooms are empty. Wallpaper in rose and ivory is immaculate and unadorned, lining paths to bedrooms with no beds. He supposes one old woman with grown children had no need to keep the place filled, though he wonders at the lack of pictures on the wall. Aren’t all grannies obsessed with their grandchildren? Granted, he only knew one of his own, and she died when he was barely eight, but he seems to remember the walls of her apartment being covered with photos of his father, art projects from his kindergarten class, Christmas wreathes out of season and recreations of famous Belgian artworks.  That, to him, is what a grandmother’s house is. Here, it’s as if every sign of life has melted into the floorboards.  

There are only a few rooms with enough furniture to call them homey. The dining room, for one, with its heavy oak table and china cabinet and pewter chandelier, meant to seat ten instead of their lonely two. The kitchen is the only room in any semblance of disarray, but he’d rather have clutter than empty space.

The master bedroom holds a magnificent four-poster bed, with a quilted coverlet and a chaise at the foot, its head overlooked by wide windows that gaze out onto the grove of elms behind the house. It’s the brightest room in the house, once Kirk pulls the musty curtains wide, but even then the dark wood panelling and mahogany wardrobes swallow the light before it can reach the walls. The wardrobes hold clothes somehow untouched by moths or rot – dresses and vests and slacks and jeans. It’s a thought both sweet and sad – that McCoy’s grandmother would have kept her husband’s clothes close, even after his passing.

Two other bedrooms host double beds with more modest trappings. The first is rather unremarkable. It only boasts a metal-framed bed, its cream sheets and matching blankets tucked into perfect nurse’s corners, and white-washed walls to match He’s spent too long in hospitals this month to want the reminder.

The second bedroom is far more pleasant. Tartan blankets and periwinkle blue wallpaper, a grating filled with ashes in the corner, a candlestick on the nightstand: it’s what a young Kirk always imagined proper country living to be. He refuses to associate his own Iowan farmstead with the same label. That was a different sort of country, the wrong sort. He could only daydream about the country if there was something better out there than what he had.

He lays claim to that space, while McCoy barely glances at either double room, instead dropping his things onto the four-poster in the master suite. He’s surprised by that, at first. Kirk doesn’t know if he could settle down into his grandparents’ old room so easily, like it would be an intrusion. Then again, maybe time softens the strangeness of that sort of thing.

The PADD in his bag hums to life the moment he collapses wearily onto the blankets, indicator blinking red with new communiques. Seems it’s only been a day, but the admirals already miss him.

Of course, they wouldn’t let him take this time without a quid pro quo. Kirk is not exactly unfamiliar with the concept of a working vacation. There are always reports to write, debriefings on events long past to deliver. All the things he could usually put off under the excuse of the next pressing mission are harder to duck when his bosses know where he is (Earth) and what he’s doing (nothing) at all times. He’d held a naïve hope that maybe if he’d just ignored the backlog long enough, the requests would get lost in the mire, but that was apparently not to be.

He puts the device away for the moment, without doing more than skimming the messages. The outside world can wait for a day, surely. For now, all he can concentrate on is his aching stomach.

He finds McCoy unpacking their supplies into the cooling unit. They’ve got enough in dehydrated foodstuffs to last a week or two, but after that one of them will have to travel to town to replenish their stocks.

“What do you say?” he says, shaking a box of flaked potatoes before putting it in the pantry between a couple dusty crates. “Remind you of the Academy food?”

“That wasn’t food, that was God testing my resolve.” Kirk snickers despite himself, and immediately feels guilty. Is he allowed to enjoy the voice of the sickness, just because it sounds so much like his friend? “We’ll live on this while we have to, until we can get a garden going. You ever gardened, Jim?”

“Unless you count getting thwacked on the leg by my mother’s overgrown raspberry bushes, then no.”

“Well, I’ll just have to teach you then.”

It’s not an unpleasant notion, and the part of him that lives in another reality is filled with warmth at the idea. The perfect daydream come to life. But his leave is nominally for three months – it was all he could negotiate. Will he still be here when the plants are done sprouting?

He has three months to hope for a miracle cure. Three months to put the next plan in motion, whatever that may be. Three months to break McCoy free from whatever sickness still holds him.

Three months to watch a garden grow.


	8. Act 2 - Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is half a day late guys, it was very important I go see Venom last night. That movie was everything I hoped it would be and more :D Anyways, on with the story!

The first few days go on like this.

_~morning~_

Kirk had forgotten what it’s like to open his eyes to natural light. The lights in ship’s quarters are rigged to simulate the nuance of solar rays (something Spock was quick to remind him isn’t always an ideal arrangement for non-human crewmembers, and he’s passed on a recommendation to Starfleet to provide other options on newer ships) but even for him, it isn’t the same as waking to the smell of spring air from an open window, or squares of new sunlight falling across his bed and warming his feet.

Without fail, McCoy is awake before him. On the second day, Kirk finds him chopping firewood at the block by the moss-covered bench with a rusty-bladed axe. He watches him split the wood with practiced ease, each stroke dead on the target. McCoy complains about his old joints with a smile, but Kirk never sees him pause to take a breath. Either this is part of the spores’ work, or McCoy is in better shape than he’d admit to.

The sun is high by the time McCoy is satisfied with the amount of firewood they have, and Kirk comes back from lugging a load to the box in the parlor to find the answer to his question laid out under the open sky. With McCoy’s plaid button-down discarded on the bench, wiry muscles and broad chest exposed to the sun, it’s clear the spores aren’t the only explanation.

This isn’t a sight he’s usually privy to, and Kirk’s eyes wander in interest. McCoy has seen Kirk shirtless countless times – first during early morning shower-shuffles at the Academy and later for mandatory physicals aboard the Enterprise – but he’s not sure the opposite has ever been true, at least not for anything longer than a few seconds.

His eyes jump from the smattering of freckles on McCoy’s shoulders to the space where his waist narrows. There’s a scar that runs the edge of his hip and dips into the small of his back. It’s too imprecise to be a surgical scar, and the edges are torn – the mark of some jagged instrument. He takes a step forward, trying to get a better look, and-

There’s something uncomfortably intimate in eyeing what McCoy has never chosen to show him, and he looks away before they can make eye contact, suddenly embarrassed. It’s like venturing too close to the stage at a play: frightening to intrude, uninvited, into the narrative of an uncertain history.

_~midday~_

McCoy’s got a simple system for their food: everything must contain at least one fresh element. There are crabapples from the trees down the way, rhubarb from an untended patch that survived the lonely years and looks primed to survive another hundred, wild chives thriving in the shadows of the trees, even thistle flowers, which can’t disguise the artificiality of a dry-wrapped salad but can at least brighten the colour.

For a doctor, McCoy hasn’t ever been particularly careful with his own diet, though he’s critical enough of Kirk’s (who in his own defence, genuinely doesn’t always have the time to eat). McCoy’s been known to survive on coffee and carbs as much as any other overworked professional. His insistence on the added element is nothing but another symptom of the spores, Kirk is certain of it, and at first it eats at him at every meal, but after a few days it’s hard not to anticipate what the mystery addition will be. It becomes something of a game, trying to guess it, and it’s a welcome distraction from thinking too hard on their situation.

The problem is, there’s too much time to think on it. They’re busy during the first week to be sure, but it’s all manual, solitary labour, and ripe for daydreaming. Cleaning the house takes a couple days, then it’s clearing the brush from where it’s crept to the sides of the house, then it’s unboarding the old shed at the back to get at the tools stored there, then preparing a spot for the promised garden. All these tasks provide the fertile soil for Kirk’s worry to fester, growing into a gnawing ache in his stomach that no amount of fresh berries can sooth. He’s making no progress, at least not where it counts. He buries his mind in reports instead, their tedium the best distraction he can muster.

The newly hewn patch of earth stretches from the seat of the bench till where the roof’s shadow falls at the highest point of midday, outlining the edge of a space that McCoy calls “modest, but it’ll do for this season” and what Kirk calls “more than my back can handle weeding on a regular basis”. He complains, but the smell of the upturned earth from the porch swing is heavenly.

Meals become hurried things. Chasing the daylight hours is more important than leisurely conversation, so chores are done separately for efficiency’s sake, and they don’t talk much, and Kirk is left alone with his thoughts more often than not during the day.

Then the sun sets, dinner is served, and the lights go down.

_~evening~_

Soon as moonlight tints the parlor windows blue and grey, the blustery nights grow chilly and the firewood is put to good use. Kirk pokes at the flames with an iron fork. A log crackles and pops as it splits apart at his prodding, releasing a dewy scent that turns acrid in the cloud of charcoal that follows.

McCoy moves aside Kirk’s PADD to place another bottle of the peach cordial in the center of the coffee table. Kirk doesn’t fail to notice the new resting place of the instrument; stashed behind a stack of books on the shelf, nearly hidden from the rest of the room.

Kirk returns to his seat and takes the proffered glass.

“Have you been back to Iowa, Jim?”

He sips – still as sweet as the first time – and sips again. Though he answers honestly, he still shifts in his seat. “Not yet. Haven’t had time this trip.” Didn’t he tell himself he would, when McCoy was settled in? And yet he’s made no plans.

“That’s not what I mean. Since the Academy?”

“When would I have? You’re the one who’s always been begging me to take more leave.”

McCoy doesn’t take the bait. He’s leaning forward in his chair, and Kirk leans forward too, placing his glass back on the table to disguise the motion and immediately regretting it. He’d very much like something to fiddle with.

“Then during the Academy. Remember when I was on Antares for the summer on that research sabbatical? Where did you go?”

Kirk recrosses his legs. “I think I was in Cabo with that pretty blonde from Xeno-Psych. You remember her? Ruth. Nice girl. Nice eyes. Blue, I think.”

 “Why not Iowa? You had the time – two months of it, if I recall.”

Kirk stares back, trying to discern the trap behind eyes that don’t betray anything but genuine curiousity. Though the words are pointed, the conversation isn’t anything more significant than they’ve had a hundred times before over lunch in the ship’s mess. He can’t figure out the endgame. At least on the ship, McCoy’s purpose was clear: come hell or high water, get back to Ceti Omicron Three. Every conversation was in service of that goal.

Kirk is good at parrying punches, when he can see their source. Here, he doesn’t even know if he’s wandering further or nearer to the swinging fists.

“I wanted a little vacation in the sun.”

“But you could have gone back. Your mother was there, and your family. Why not go home?”

Winona doesn’t even know he’s back on Earth. He hasn’t called her yet. That’s another thing he tells himself he plans to do. _Will_ do. Should have done two weeks ago. She’ll be happy to see him. Probably.

Frank will be there too. Kirk knows exactly how _that_ reunion will go.

He smiles, a little too tight at the edges, letting his gaze wander over McCoy’s shoulder. “It didn’t really feel like home. At the time,” he amends, careful to keep his tone light. Better not to hand McCoy any easy ammunition, even if he still hasn’t figured out where the gun is hiding.

“Where do you feel at home, then?”

_Not Iowa._ “The Enterprise is as close to it as I’ve gotten, I think.”

“Is that so?” McCoy watches Kirk carefully, and he flushes under the scrutiny. That’s got to be a trick question, a little too shrewd to be friendly banter.

“Yes. Of course it is.” McCoy just keeps on looking at him with that knowing stare and it makes Kirk want to crawl out of his skin. He used to be so good at reading his expressions. Or at least, he thought he was.

“Really,” McCoy says skeptically, and takes another sip.

“And what, you feel at home here?” Kirk shoots back, defensive though he knows that this is the sickness talking.

Isn’t it?

Hasn’t he asked himself the same question – is this really what I want my life to be? –

 at least three times in the last half a year? Hasn’t he contemplated the resignation form in Starfleet’s database in the wee hours of the morning, fingers itching to do something truly reckless?

“Look around you,” McCoy says, and Kirk does, passing his eyes over rich upholstery and dancing flames and bookshelves stacked high and the glass clasped in McCoy’s grip. “It’s heaven on earth. I’ll never be this at home anywhere else.”

Something in Kirk’s chest jolts. with a hurt that spreads like embers through his extremities. If the Enterprise is his home, it’s only for the people. They built it into one, him and McCoy and Spock and Uhura and… McCoy feels at home here. In this nest of childhood memories, as far from their friends as possible.

Kirk can’t blame him, but it stings just enough to have him spitting that same hurt out in his next words.

“What, in this empty house, with nobody around for miles? The walls are bare, Bones. At least on the Enterprise you can talk to another human being every once in a while. This is more like a morgue than a home.”

_Crack_.

The glass in McCoy’s hand shatters.

Kirk watches, dumbfounded, as the pieces rain down onto the hardwood floor, landing in an oozing mosaic amongst the remains of the drink to the tune of McCoy’s curses. Before the puddle of liquid can creep below his chair, McCoy grabs a cloth napkin and begins sopping up the mess. The white fabric comes away red.

“Bones, you’re bleeding.”

McCoy looks at his skin like he’s never seen it before, turning his hand about in a soft arc above the table. Kirk stands and rushes to his side. He grabs the hand, ceasing its motion. There’s a glass sliver embedded in the palm, not larger than a toothpick, but protruding and wet with blood. He pulls it out gingerly, careful not to let his unwashed fingers too close to the entrance of the wound. McCoy’s harsh breath ghosts on his neck at the sliver comes free, but evens when the task is done.

“You’d have made a good doctor, Jim.”

The murmur is warm and low, sincere, and a thrill runs through his hands. It sounds like Bones, the real one, whose hard-earned praise is the only kind Kirk trusts. “Never as good as you.”

He grabs a clean napkin from the table and moves to start wrapping McCoy’s palm, but McCoy’s uninjured hand stays him. “I take back what I said,” he says wryly. “Unless a good doctor would want me to die of gangrene. Let me clean it first.”

The sight of McCoy bustling about, looking for medical supplies nudges the axis of Kirk’s world closer to its normal state. Nothing, not even this sickness, can force the doctor out of McCoy, and that’s hopeful in itself.

McCoy rinses the wound under cold water in the kitchen sink, and Kirk watches, holding a clean towel. The soapy water runs pink against the copper plating. McCoy’s voice is just loud enough to be heard over the running of the tap.

“You’re right, Jim. This place is too empty for one person. That’s why I’m glad you’re here with me.”


	9. Act 2 - Chapter 4

“Are you sure you won’t come? Might be a nice change of scenery.”

McCoy snorts. “You’ve barely been here a week and you already need a change of scenery? I’m surprised at you. What ever happened to smelling the fresh air, feeling the earth beneath your toes?”

“I’ll get plenty of fresh air on the walk. And anyways, isn’t it you who’s going to be cooped up and lonely without me?”

“I’ve got a good book and a porch to sit on and sunshine all day long. What more could a man want?”

“Well, I don’t know. A beautiful woman to share it all with?”

“Jim, you come back with everything I put on that list and I’ll call you the most beautiful woman I ever laid eyes on.”

“I’ll hold you to that. …Alright, I’m off.”

“Shoo. Leave me in peace.”

McCoy already has his eyes closed, laid back and lounging in the porch swing with his hands folded behind his head. He raises one to lazily flick Kirk away, like he was brushing off a fly, but his eyes crinkle at the edges.

It could have been any normal conversation, banter and back and forth. It seems like the longer they stay here, the more McCoy falls back into his old self, the cracks of gruff world-weariness shining through.  There are moments Kirk forgets that they aren’t just having a conversation, taking a long vacation, enjoying a break from it all. He’s grateful for the empty house, the tender patch of upturned earth and the blue sky instead of black stars. Otherwise, it would be too easy to forget.

Kirk lays aside his uneasiness and shoulders his empty pack. It’s not the same one he came with – that one was too big, meant more for field missions than grocery runs, and it cut into his shoulders without the durable fabric of his uniform to lessen the rub. He’d found this one hanging on a hook by the kitchen door, like it was waiting for him to take on his way out. The fabric is something softer than burlap, hand-woven, and there are tiny embroidered flowers dotted around the drawstring neck. It suits the landscape better than anything Starfleet-issued.

The road feels less hard than it did when they came through before. Though he leaves before the grandfather clock chimes nine, a sticky heat is already rising in the air, and he trades the pleasant coolness of that early morning walk for the ability to see his surroundings this time around. At least with the sun already rising, he can see the fields clearly, enjoy the sheen of sunshine on wheat tips not yet fully budded, their expanse stretching out to the horizon of the south, and to the dark line of the forest and green-capped mountains of the north. He passes an abandoned farmhouse on his right, its walls scarred by wind and wear but foundation still standing firm. Kirk shares the path with an assortment of snails, curious birds, and even a suspicious fox that slinks back into the safety of the grass when he draws near.

He’d almost thought they were alone in this entire state, but the sun’s almost at its peak when he finally sees another human.

The older woman sits in the middle of a cleared patch of grass in the space between two fields, silvery hair blown askew from its clasps by the light breeze. She looks at Kirk curiously over the top of her easel. Her hands are stained purple and azure below the bracelet of fabric on her wrist, but her checkered dress is spotless.

Kirk nods at her, doing his best to be both polite and non-intrusive, but she calls out to him and he wanders over to her improvised workspace.

“I haven’t seen you before,” she says. “Didn’t reckon there was anyone left in the county I hadn’t met. What’s your name?”

“James,” he replies to be polite, but the name tastes wrong in the rural setting. It’s too formal, reeking of military decoration and commencement ceremonies. “Jim,” he corrects himself.

“Well, which is it? James or Jim?” He hears his grandmother’s scolding in her not-quite-cross tone and he feels suddenly young, in the best possible way.

“Jim.”

“Then, Jim, why haven’t I seen you before?”

“I’m new in town. Or, the area, I should say. Heading to town, actually.” He suppresses the urge to scuff his foot into the dirt. This is not his most eloquent introduction, but something about her scratches again at the memory of his own grandmother, and he finds that he wants to make a good impression, and that’s usually when he most trips over his words.

“Visiting, or here to stay?”

He thinks hard before he answers, not sure how much to share. He’s not keen to lie, but sharing too much feels like an invasion of McCoy’s privacy. They’re here to help him recover, after all, and that’s really not anyone else’s business.

“Visiting, for the moment.”

“Oh, for the moment? Well, be careful of becoming an old woman like me. I said I was only here for the season and here I am, 40 years later. This place takes hold of you, and you’ll never want to live anywhere else.” She smooths the escaped wisps of her hair back into her bun, leaving small streaks of purple behind her ears, and picks up her brush. “I’m nearly done with this. What should I paint next?”

He walks behind her so he can see the painting better, and so she can’t see the surprise on his face when he sees what she’s painted.

It’s an incredibly detailed rendering of a nebula. Gaseous swirls and eddies trail around bright stars, each line of purple and blue precise and bold. The strokes seem to churn as his eyes try to follow their pattern, a master class of static movement. The colours quite aren’t brilliant enough to do the real thing justice, but each bright stroke of white pulls out a new glimmer as the woman adds her final highlights.

“Can you see something like this out here?” he asks, awed. “I didn’t think that any nebulas were visible from Earth.”

“Didn’t see it on Earth. I was a freighter hand, in another life. A harder life, and I don’t miss it, but things like this... they never leave you.”

Kirk thinks of all the terrible and beautiful and wonderful things he’s seen through the Enterprise’s screen. “No, they don’t.”

“There,” she says, flourishing her brush with a dramatic flick as she adds her last stroke. “Finished, or as finished as it will ever be.” She turns back to look at him. “You didn’t answer me. What should I paint next?”

He thinks about it a moment, gives the question the attention it deserves. “A ship in a bottle,” he says finally. “With white sails and rigging.”

“Oh? Interesting choice. Why’s that?”

“Always wanted one, as a boy.”

“Did you now,” she says, and laughs. It’s a deep and throaty sound. “You look like the type,” and Kirk wants to ask her what she means, but she’s already reaching into the basket beside her and pulling out a smaller canvas, barely larger than the span of two hands. “I’ll need to go home to find a reference, but I can do the background now, at least. Come find me here again in a week, and we’ll see how much progress I’ve made. But you were going to town, weren’t you? Best be moving along.”

“Right. It was a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

“Well, aren’t you a gentleman.”

“I try my best,” he says, and grins. The whole encounter feels like a fairy-tale. He has the strangest feeling that the minute he turns the bend in the road, the woman and the clearing and the painting will vanish in a wisp of smoke. “Have a good day.”

“And to you.”

She’s nothing more than a blip of purple and grey in the distance before he realizes he never asked her name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, another character enters the field (heh)! Maybe Jim and Bones aren't the only people in the whole state of Georgia after all :P
> 
> Thank you so much to the people who've been commenting, it warms my heart! Checking my phone on Thursday and seeing so many nice messages in my inbox really helped me get through a tough day at work, so much love to all of you.


	10. Act 2 - Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only 2 hours late this time! I'm gonna keep this Wed/Sun schedule if I could only remember...
> 
> A bit short this time, sorry! This was originally lumped with the previous chapter, and might have been better stuck back with it to make something of a decent length, but ah well, too late now :)

The town is not much more than a smattering of buildings grouped together around one long main street that branches from the path Kirk’s been following and stretches out until it’s swallowed again by the waving fields. The buildings are a strange combination of old-timey architecture and contemporary construction, ranging from the candy-striped poles of the local barber to the sleek walls of the public transporter station they’d beamed to on their first morning. As he walks down the dusty street, he peeks into some of the businesses, but most are shuttered and dark. In fact, the only place that seems to have any traffic at all is the one-room library, where he catches a glimpse of a few white-haired men pouring over their books in silence. Maybe he’s come on a local holiday? He gives up and gets back to his original mission.

When McCoy told him to head to the general store, it had conjured images of wooden planking and hand-painted red letters, barrels of whole pickles and fresh baked bread piled high in wicker baskets, hot fudge and ice cream by the scoop. The modernity of the actual store takes him aback. The shelves hold uniformly packaged loaves and government branded cans, their labels plain and familiar. No cheerful grannies and men with stalks of grain between their teeth shoot the breeze on a covered wooden porch. Instead, there are plain white walls, pleasantly muted but impersonal, and electronic displays with stock notes. He’s a little disappointed, truth be told.

The produce at least seems fresh and so he starts with his basket there. Lemons, tomatoes, zucchinis larger than his forearm, kale and sprouts and even some Vulcan plomeek – mostly for the sour expression he expects to see on McCoy’s face when he presents it. It’s surprising to see it stocked – the small supply cultivated on Earth as a foreign curiousity became a rare treasure after Vulcan’s demise, and he’d have expected what remained on Earth to be carefully hoarded out of the reach of any parasitic infection. They could replicate it, sure, just like horticulturalists did with other extinct plant species, but there’s always something lost in the genetic restructuring. Each piece of replicated matter is perfect, both in aesthetics and ripeness, but that’s not the same as something handpicked, just slightly overripened, left a tad too long in the sun. There, at least, he and McCoy can agree.

He takes his basket, piled high with fruits and vegetables and a few choice cuts of freeze-dried venison and beef to the counter, glancing around for a store attendant.

“Store” is something of a misnomer for places like these. Out in the galaxy at large, it would be a place to barter with the going currency in exchange for goods. A galactic market economy still flourishes even into the 23rd century, but on Earth the practice died out a hundred years ago. Humans held onto the archaic name, but in actuality a ‘store’ is more of a distribution centre. ID codes help the government track individual consumption for statistical purposes, but there’s no real quota on what you can and can’t take.

That doesn’t, however, stop the shopkeeper from giving him a snide once-over as he scans the (admittedly large) pile of food Kirk has collected. “All this for you? Where does it all go, I wonder,” he mocks, and Kirk might be a little self-conscious, too aware of how much more tightly his uniform fits than it did as a cadet, but he’s got years of facing down bigger bullies to bolster him.

“Oh, I imagine the same place as the next man. It all ends up back in the ground, one way or the other,” he says cheerfully. The shopkeeper doesn’t return the smile.

“Just mind it doesn’t end up on the floor of the shop,” he says, eyeing Kirk’s arms doubtfully, as though not sure they’re up to the task of carrying said provisions. Kirk makes sure to flex a little as he swings his pack onto the counter. The man’s eyes immediately zero in on the bag.

“I think I’ll manage.”

As he carefully packs up his groceries, from cans on the bottom to delicate rosemary on top, and clasps the burlap fold overtop, the shopkeeper’s scowl deepens. By the end his face is purplish, gone from mildly annoyed to outright mean.

“Where did you say you were staying?” he asks, not even attempting a polite tone.

Kirk pauses. “I didn’t.” He spends a pregnant moment staring the shopkeeper down, trying to decide if it’s worth withholding the information on principle. Eventually, diplomacy wins over. “Did you know… ah…” It occurs to him that he’s not sure whether McCoy’s last name even came from his grandmother’s side of the family, let alone if she took it. “The old ranch house, out past Skyler Road.”

“The McCoy place,” he says with a sneer, sounding as if he’d known the answer before Kirk had even spoken. He glances back at the bursting pack. “This isn’t all for you, then, I take it?”

“No, it isn’t,” he answers cautiously. The man harrumphs and looks away, and Kirk re-shoulders the pack, more confused than angry at the rudeness.

“I see.”

He shifts awkwardly. Diplomacy is out the window, and there isn’t really a way to end the conversation civilly, if indeed there’s a conversation left standing. The shopkeeper is determined to avoid his eye, choosing instead to glare at a space between two shelves.

“Well… have a good day.” He gets nothing but a head jerk in response.

The shuttered shop windows along the main street, merely a curiousity on his way in, almost feel hostile in light of the strange animosity of the shopkeeper. Like they’re boarded up just to keep out visitors like him. Kirk thinks as he starts the long walk back that if the whole town is like that man, he understands why McCoy might have wanted to stay behind.


	11. Act 2 - Chapter 6

They feast that night, with the best steaks Kirk’s ever eaten and mounds of fresh vegetables and flavourful potatoes. Kirk doesn’t mention the rude shopkeeper, but he tells McCoy about the woman and the painting – or at least he tries to. He doesn’t seem too interested, brushing off Kirk’s colourful description with praises about the food and plans for the next day’s hoeing and weeding. When he presses further, McCoy laughs it off, saying she might just be a ghost come to haunt him on his travels. He’d find it funnier if it didn’t seem so plausible.

They’re almost ready to plant, and Kirk is relieved to find that they don’t need another store trip to get seeds, with enough left over in storage to suffice for their patch.

McCoy turns in early, claiming a day of good rest and fresh air has tired him out, which leaves Kirk to check his messages and catch up on reports without McCoy’s reproachful glare. He settles down with his PADD into an armchair by the fire and flicks through the pile of messages.

The latest report from the Enterprise is a delay on their current mission – they’ve been waylaid by a new hostile species of some kind, but negotiations are in progress. In Spock’s words, the situation is under control, and he’d be more comforted by that if it wasn’t the same response he’d expect if the situation was about to turn into galaxy-wide armageddon.

Starfleet wants an update on McCoy’s condition. He keeps his response short: no changes to report. “He’s getting back to his old crochety self, but he still doesn’t want to leave the farm” isn’t useful information for Starfleet. They’re concerned with when McCoy will be back to active duty, and Kirk along with him. McCoy sounding like himself isn’t a cause for celebration if he’s not aboard a spaceship to put his skills to a higher and better use than bandaging cuts and tilling soil.

Diving back into the world of starships and bureaucracy after days of nothing but fresh air and exercise makes his head ache. What was a welcome distraction at first now feels like dragging his thoughts through molasses. It would be simple, so simple, just to turn the PADD off and ignore the notifications. There aren’t problems he has to solve if he can’t read the messages. But he’s a captain, before anything else, and he doesn’t get to just ignore that duty because the nightcap coursing through his veins is warm and the fire warmer still, and he’s so very tired, but in a different way than on the Enterprise. He can do this, if he focuses.

He’s nearly done proofreading his latest muddled attempt at a mission debrief summary when a clatter from the hallway interrupts his train of thought. His racing mind jumps immediately to the ridiculous: _it’s a_ _ghost, oh my god_. It would fit with the whole creepy abandoned-house-in-the-woods thing, and McCoy’s voice floats into his head, reminding him of a pair of unmarked graves by the creek. It’s tempting to grab a fire poker from beside the dying flames. Iron is supposed to dispel spirits, right?

It takes him longer than he’d admit to work up the courage to creep to the hallway, but once he does the mystery resolves itself rather quickly. It’s not a ghost, but it may as well be given the pallor of McCoy’s face, his skin waxy in the dim light. Kirk calls out to him, softly, but if he hears him it doesn’t matter. His pace doesn’t falter, his head doesn’t turn, as he opens the screen door and steps out onto the porch. Kirk sets aright the coatstand McCoy’s knocked over, its empty arms climbing to the ceiling like a withered tree, and follows.

He’d known the man to suffer brief bouts of sleepwalking at the Academy, but usually a word would arouse him. This is different, somehow.

The night air cuts under his shirt like shards of cold metal as he tries to follow McCoy onto the porch, but the door swings closed and he’s left feeling colder than before in the sudden emptiness. The fire sputters its last gasping breath behind him in the parlor and the hall falls into darkness. With light steps, he moves carefully into the kitchen, dancing around the table and chairs and hanging pans to make his way to the window.

McCoy sits on the porch swing, gently rocking. A single candle burns dimly on the banister at his side, and casts the faint shadow of tulips on the chest at his feet. Kirk watches a moment, and as his eyes adjust to the moonlight he sees the shadow of McCoy’s lips moving. But whatever he says, it’s carried away on the wind, leaving nothing but the whistle through the trees, and Kirk to watch impotently, half scared to be caught, more transfixed than worried. He doesn’t seem in danger of running off or collapsing, and after five minutes of observation Kirk deems it safe to leave him to his reverie.

He grabs his PADD and after checking that the fire is, indeed, fully out, and heads to bed – but his eyes don’t close until the creak of footsteps pass by his room, and his muscles don’t untense until the heavy door of the master bedroom down the hall groans shut.


	12. Act 2 - Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little longer (and later, sorry OTLL) than last update! Things are moving along...

“There’s no need to rush. We can always make a second trip.”

“I’ve got it,” Kirk grunts, and tries not to let his grimace betray just how much he doesn’t got it.

McCoy’s got this amused look as he plucks a small bag of seeds from one of the top shelves and drops it on top of the stack of crates that are just a few inches from slipping entirely out of Kirk’s palms. His groan is impossible to stifle.

“Clearly.” McCoy reaches up and takes the top crate with its haphazardly perched pouch from the pile. Kirk’s spine realigns to a more natural angle and McCoy grins knowingly. “Don’t take this as a commentary on your strength, but an order from your doctor. I don’t want you laid up with a strained back for the sake of your ego.”

“Spare me your misplaced concern, Doctor. Besides, we’re on leave. I don’t think the chain of command applies here.”

“Then do it for the sake of _my_ health. If anything kills me young, it’s going to be watching you throw yourself headfirst into another situation you can’t handle.”

“Ye of little faith.” He can’t grumble too seriously with the relief his back is radiating. “You’ve won this round, Doctor, but I see a flaw in your scheme.”

“Oh?”

“Who’s going to open the door?”

They somehow manage to make it out of the shed with only a few casualties lost to gravity, and McCoy is quick enough to dart back and retrieve the fallen goods once they’ve dumped the rest of the lot out by the garden patch.

The dewy ground is cool and pleasant beneath Kirk’s bare feet. Worms inch in and out of the crookedly hewn pathways, creating their own crisscrossed trails in the dirt. The sun hasn’t yet broken above the treeline - a good time to plant, skirting the edge of the ungodly heat of midday.

They’ve got a veritable cornucopia of seeds to choose from – carrots, turnips, summer squash, snap peas, potatoes, radishes, a few unlabeled pouches that Kirk can’t guess the contents of – and all in such abundance that they could plant a patch ten times the size of what they’ve prepared.

“You sure these are still good?” Kirk asks, pinching a few seeds from the turnip pouch and rolling their dry weight between his fingers. “I know I’m not a gardener, but if they’ve been sitting in that shed since your grandmother died…”

“300 years of selective breeding has gotten us hardier plant stock than you might expect. I’m not worried about these little ones – I think they’ll sprout up just fine.”

“Yes, but 30-odd years seems like an awfully long time,” he says dubiously.

“Have a little faith.”

They plant a bit of everything. McCoy shows Kirk how to make a divot in the earth with his thumb and drop a couple seeds in, then repeat every few inches for the root vegetables. The peas they give a wider berth, lined up in a row near the shade drop of the house. Once Kirk has the hang of it, McCoy leaves him to his own devices, but even with the two of them, they barely manage to cover a third of the plot before the sun is high enough to start beating out Kirk’s motivation to continue shuffling and bending.

He concedes defeat at about 1100, and with a back slick with sweat and hands caked in dirt, he goes to search for water. He needs to sooth his parched mouth. Every time his teeth touch, grit grinds between them, like flour to a millstone, except it’s probably his teeth that will end up ground down in the end.

He finds the nozzle of the hose where McCoy points it out, hiding nestled in the unkempt grasses by the porch, and follows its snaking path around the left side of the house into the blissful shade. The labyrinthine grasses provide effective camouflage for the green rubber, but he eventually finds the spigot knob and, forgetting all sense of decency, turns the hose directly onto his head.

By the time he turns the water off, his clothes are effectively drenched. He’ll definitely have to go change before getting anything else done for the day, but the momentary relief was worth it. He drops the nozzle and startles when it lands with not a soft thud, but an echoing _clunk_. Curious, he bends down and starts to clear the brush away where it fell.

Beneath the swept back grass lies a metal hatch, framed by a sturdy wooden border embedded into the ground. An old-fashioned padlock holds the hatch down, and though it’s obviously old it shows no sign of giving when he tries an experimental tug. A root cellar? Maybe they’ll have somewhere to store their harvest, if they manage to make enough to store despite Kirk’s clumsy efforts.

McCoy is raking dirt over the portion they’ve finished when he comes back around the house, but as soon as McCoy catches sight of him, he plants his rake flat and leans on the rounded top. Though he’s still twenty paces away, he can hear McCoy’s low whistle.

“Aren’t you a tall drink of water for a hot summer’s day?” and Kirk laughs, but he also can’t help but blush at the tease. He looks ridiculous, with soaked jeans clinging to his legs and dripping shirt lying rumpled against his chest.

McCoy’s eyes are mischievous, and he continues to openly stare as Kirk approaches. “If you’d like, I can bring back to the hose and make the two of us match?”

“Oh, I think I’m quite happy to just enjoy the view,” and Kirk’s step falters. That sounded a little less teasing, a little more… sultry? Then again, almost anything spoken in a Southern drawl is bound to have a little hint of something warmer, and their time here is broadening McCoy’s accent day by day, as if its full range was waiting to be unlocked by the first breath of country air.

“Well, drink your fill,” he says, and tries to strike a jaunty pose, but it’s hard to even play at sexiness with damp underwear chafing every step. He abandons the ploy and picks up another rake. God, he hopes they’ll eat soon. He needs an excuse to get inside and find something more comfortable.

McCoy snorts and goes back to deriding Kirk for trampling over their good work, and Kirk can breathe a little easier once he’s not under scrutiny. Still, even after they’ve abandoned the garden for lunch and thankfully, drier clothes, he still imagines he can feel McCoy’s stare lingering, and he’s not sure why he can’t stop thinking about it.


	13. Act 2 - Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I SWEAR I'M NOT DEAD. Sorry for going awol, folks. I ended up on a longer-than-usual business trip and I forgot to send my doc along for the ride, so no updates for me. But I'm back! And hopefully no more long interruptions.
> 
> In recompense, have two chapters tonight. (They're both a little short anyway :))

They finish planting over the course of two days, leaving little to do in its wake. What was a week and a half of flurried activity abruptly ends, leaving Kirk with a void of responsibilities that’s… unsettling, at first. On the Enterprise, there was always something to do, and not enough time to do it. Being on the frontier meant that there was no such thing as routine, no business-as-usual days where he could kick back and put up his feet like he imagined some freighter captains doing, with their steady routes to and from the colonies, or even more seasoned starship captains, who’d earned the seniority to finish their careers with milk runs before retiring early. Even a simple geological survey could, and often did, turn into a first contact situation, or a conflict with an unknown cosmic force, or any number of other equally treacherous situations.

At the back of his mind, always, is that his ship is off somewhere past the stars, facing god knows what without his watchful eye. But every day he receives his report, and every day they’ve averted disaster – without him.

Does that rankle his pride? He’d be lying if he said it didn’t sting a little, but at the same time, he knows his crew. They’ve been together for the greater part of four years now and he’s perfectly aware of what they’re capable of. If anyone was competent enough to run the place in his absence, it’s Spock. Hell, he’d told him as much on multiple occasions, that he deserves his own command, and as much as he’d miss him if he ever took him up on that, Kirk hates the thought that he’s holding another member of the crew back from the type of career they deserve, especially such a good friend.

The Enterprise will be safe in Spock’s hands, he knows this, and that anxiety passes its height, it gives way to the second anxiety, the one laced through every aspect of his new life.

There’s a ticking clock on what they’re building here, a promise of return to status quo for Kirk at least, but he’s no closer to guessing a solution to McCoy’s problem than he was when they first arrived. Part of him, he knows, was hoping that some magical key would just fall into his lap here in Georgia, something that would unlock the bolt drawn across McCoy’s mind. But the longer they’re here, the more it feels like he’s stepping backwards. He’s gained no real special insight into Leonard McCoy that he didn’t already have. And with nothing to do but sit, and talk, and be in each other’s presence... well, the urgency he felt at their arrival is hard to hold onto. With McCoy functionally indistinguishable from the man Kirk’s always known. He can’t bring himself constantly needling the same triggers that failed to produce a result on the ship – not because it feels cruel to McCoy, who he’s sure would shrug off the harsh words without much ado, but for his own sanity.

To be here, in the place McCoy loves, that Kirk had always hoped to visit, and to spend all his time attempting to attack, demean, hurt... So what if it was only a ploy to get the admirals to let him come here, this is genuinely the first real leave he’s taken in three years, and what he finds, once he’s gotten past the strange sensation of not having large-scale responsibility, is that he’s _tired._ Maybe so tired that he couldn’t process it while there was still work to be done. The first time that he falls asleep in an armchair by the fire and wakes the next morning, wrapped in the quilt he recognizes from the master bedroom, with the sound of bacon crackling in the kitchen, he realizes there’d been an ache behind his eyes that he’d been ignoring, that he only knows now in its absence. He’d forgotten what it was like to feel rested.

They stay up the next night, and McCoy tells a story about the dog who used to live down by the creek, who followed a clever squirrel straight into the water and came out so wet she’d drenched the little boy who’d been tasked to watch her. He promises to take Kirk there soon, so they can sit by the water and read, or fish, and Kirk only barely hears the words through the muddled fog of true tiredness – not born of anxiety or stress or overwork, but labour and natural light.

He lets himself drift off, and tells himself tomorrow. Tomorrow he’ll work harder, dig deeper, try to circumvent the clock that’s counting down their numbered days.

For tonight, he’ll sleep, and wake up with sun on his face, and nothing but sun on the horizon.


	14. Act 2 - Chapter 9

The road to town is just as empty as it was the week before. He walks, carrying the same pack from the nail above the doorframe. A hawk swoops by overhead and he’s tempted to pause, try to capture the moment in his memory, but he hurries along. He’s got to know if the painter will be back at her perch.

Anticipation makes the walk go quickly, and soon the same clearing lies plain out before him in the midday sun.

And it’s also empty.

He looks around, but there’s nobody to spy in the distance. He ventures off the road, but when he reaches the place he could have sworn the woman sat with her plum-stained fingers, he can find no evidence of her ever being there at all. No fresh easel indents in the trodden grass, no flecks of paint or forgotten rags, no sign at all that the place has been disturbed by anything but the humming insects.

The more he thinks about it, the more surreal the chance encounter seems. If he didn’t know better, he’d say it was a heat-induced hallucination, but he’s had his mind addled in such myriad ways by various phenomena over the years that he trusts himself to, at the very least, say that she was real. That woman was real. She must have been. Otherwise, he might as well call up Starfleet and tell them McCoy’s insanity is catching. Better commit him now, before it’s too late. Though…

If he truly fell prey to the same, would he even know it? It’s an unsettling thought.

To distract himself, he schemes up ways to find the woman (who is definitely real, and definitely not a ghost he dreamt up) on the remainder of his walk. He’s got enough government clout to pull up records of local residents, but that skirts the edge of abuse of authority, especially since all he wants is his curiousity satisfied. Nor is he particularly inclined to go knocking on doors and risk running into more people like the surly shopkeeper. Speaking of…

If this town were big enough to house two grocery stores, he’d certainly be headed in the opposite direction, rather than shuffling uneasily near the entrance to the same one as last week. Based on the shopkeeper’s reaction to him, he wouldn’t be surprised to be shooed out with a broom.

A middle-aged woman brushes past him and enters the store. She glances appraisingly as she passes by. He does his best to convey that he does, in fact have a reason to be hanging by the door that isn’t just loitering, but judging by the wrinkle in her nose and the harsh set of her mouth, he’s not successful.

He keeps to the back shelves, trying to stay out of sight as long as possible. But when he finally makes it up to the register, it’s clear that his conniving was unwarranted. Sitting at the counter is a young woman, probably in her early twenties, who greets him with a polite nod and pleasantries. She bears a resemblance to the man from before – she might be his daughter, or niece – but seems to share none of his ill-will, or the woman who glares at him from the medicinal aisle. He even manages to make her crack a smile with a well-timed joke.

A few less of the shops are boarded up today. He even sees a couple of kids playing with a ball by the side of the road. They ignore him as he goes by, but they don’t seem frightened or annoyed by his presence. For a small moment, his heart lifts. Maybe the town isn’t a total lost cause.


	15. Act 2 - Chapter 10

The trail to the creek takes them south, between the woodblock and the mossy bench, though it’s hardly recognizable as a trail until they’ve fully breached the treeline and the house is blocked from view by a thicket of dark leaves.

It’s a path through old growth, and the trees grow more wild with every step away from the familiar sphere of the house and the road. The dirt is well-beaten by footsteps large and small, but the path is marred by tree roots reaching like gnarled fingers from the ground, obscured by wet leaves and overshadowed by bushes. Every step Kirk expects to sprain an ankle and he walks gingerly, watching where he places each foot and trying not to drop the bucket in his right hand.

McCoy walks the path with no fear. His free hand reaches out to steady himself on the encroaching trees but it doesn’t grasp for purchase. The touches remind him of his balance, nothing more, and soon he’s stepping as surely as a stag over and around the unseen obstacles that threaten to take Kirk’s feet out from under him.

“I’ll tell you, it’s something to see _you_ be the one on the wrong foot,” McCoy says as he watches Kirk jump around, shaking the toe he’s just caught on a particularly nasty root and muttering soft curses.

“I don’t know what you mean, Bones,” he says once the pain’s faded enough to speak. “How many times did you patch me up after security training?”

“I doubt I’d have had to if you hadn’t insisted on picking opponents three times your size. And you still haven’t convinced me all those fights happened under Academy-sanctioned circumstances.”

“If you had your doubts, you never asked.”

“Why ask when you know the answer?”

“You’d rather get straight to the eye-rolling?”

“I do value efficiency. Still, it’s nice to see you taking a little care, for once.”

“So, how about you? Were you ever a rough and tumble boy, before the Academy knocked all that sense into you?” He thinks of the nervous fidgeting of McCoy’s hands in the shuttle the day they first met. He’d probably been the sensible one since long before the Academy – maybe that’s why the two of them fit so well. If there’s one thing Kirk had never been accused of, it was sensibility.

“Oh, sure. I used to drive my teachers mad when I was young. Couldn’t make me sit still no matter what they tried.”

“Really? I always pictured young Leonard with his nose in a book.”

“I liked books well enough, but not when you were stuck reading them inside and the sun was out. Besides, I’d always liked seeing things for myself. Why read about a butterfly when you can actually watch it fluttering?”

“That why you wanted to join Starfleet? Get to see all those interesting plagues and ailments in the great wilderness?”

“Hmff, well. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of it. But I’ve gotten in a fight or two in my day, if you must know.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Did the young Leonard McCoy ever get knocked off his feet?”

“Only person who ever managed it was my sister,” McCoy says, and grins wolfishly. “She was a tyrant when we were children. A foot taller than me, and she always knew the right places to jab. Maybe she should’ve been the doctor in the family. I used to run out into the trees and hide whenever she got into one of her moods. Guess that’s as good a reason as any to get comfortable with nature.”

“From what you’ve told me about Leslie, I always took her to be a bit cold, but not mean.”

“Well, it was really only here. I can’t say I blame her, after all of it – she loved the big city, see, and I don’t think coming out to the boonies to stay for the summer was as appealing to her as it was to me. She missed her friends, and her room, and the kind of modern conveniences you don’t get in a place like this. And I could never make her see… she was too stubborn. She wanted to be back in Atlanta, and that was that.”

“So she took it out on you?” The thought pings something deep in Kirk’s gut, an old ache that he tries not to think too hard on.

“Only when she could catch me. And boy, was I _fast_.” He stops dead in the center of the trail and Kirk pauses as well, careful not to run into the modified rake slung over McCoy’s shoulder. He follows McCoy’s gaze down to where the path began to widen and curve towards the east. “I’d be halfway to the creek before she’d even realize I’d left. I don’t think she ever made it past that bend before she’d be too out of breath and give up. Think the exercise did her good though. She always was a bit more friendly after a good chase.”

Kirk laughs, but it’s not a comfortable sound. “Well, at least you had the sense not to steal your stepfather’s car. That particular chase didn’t make him any friendlier, though.” The ache persists, and he searches for a way to change the subject. Thankfully, McCoy lets him.

The path continues to widen as they round the bend, branches thinner and greener, less deadwood and rotten leaves to obscure the way forward, and soon enough their conversation is overtaken by the gurgle of moving water.  The trail terminates at the edge of a ravine, its steep side sloping down to the promised creek at the base. It’s not an easy climb down, and Kirk’s hands end up scraped from clutching at exposed roots to avoid tumbling down into the mud. As they descend, the sound of rushing grows louder.

The creek itself isn’t particularly wide, nor does it look deeper than his waist, but by the sound Kirk imagines it broadens, just like the path, further down the way. There’s no log or set of stepstones to climb across, but it seems like they could wade to the other side without any danger of being swept away. On the other side of the water, the ravine slopes more gently up to another line of trees, golden light filtering through between the sparse trunks of elms and poplars.

The mud at the creek’s edge is heavy, dark and alive. Each lap of water washes a ripple of sediment closer to his boots. His first tentative step forward threatens to sink him up to the ankle and he retreats to the surer bank, but McCoy wastes no time discarding his boots and socks, rolling his pants up to mid-calf and stepping straight into the quagmire. He passes the rake back to Kirk, who takes it dubiously.

“Don’t give me that look. You haven’t lived until you’ve had these fresh.”

“I’m not a squeamish man, Bones, but any sane person would feel at least a little nervous at the prospect of carrying tentacled little monsters in an open bucket.”

“They aren’t going to jump out and bite you, if that’s what’s got you all bothered.”

“I’ll hold you personally responsible if you’re lying.”

“Why do I feel like you wouldn’t be fussing nearly as much if I were Spock?”

“Have you forgotten that Vulcans can’t lie?”

“You and I both know that’s bullshit. He hasn’t got enough human in him to be a decent fellow but he’s sure got enough to tell a whopper every now and again. Or did you honestly think he finds the music you try to introduce him to ‘pleasant’?”

“He told me it was a fine example of human innovation!”

“That you believed that was a compliment says more about you than it does about Vulcans.”

“Catch the fish already, will you?”

The water is too murky to see much, and as soon as McCoy grabs the rake back and starts trawling with its meshed head the kicked-up silt renders it entirely opaque. When he draws the rake back up, the basket is empty.

“No luck?”

“Give me half a minute,” McCoy grumbles, and goes back to work.

“Alright,” says Kirk, and deposits the bucket in the mud at his feet, choosing to sit on the grassy bank instead. “Good luck.” McCoy only grunts in response.

Most of the ravine is shaded by the trees at the top, but the portion directly above the water opens up to a clear blue sky. As McCoy triumphantly draws up the basket with a few scrawny crawfish, Kirk watches the shadows of the leaves flicker across the water. Every once in a while, a strange shape flicks across the oblong patterns and he lifts his eyes to find the source.

Hanging from a sturdy branch that spans most of the length of the creek from the other shore are the frayed remains of a rope. Its snakelike threads flutter in the light breeze. The ends are too uniform to have been decayed to the point of breaking – someone must have cut the rope at the base, leaving the threads to unravel. Kirk reaches a hand out, trying to catch the edge of the shadow with his fingers, but the breeze shifts and the shadows shift to the other bank, out of reach.

The bucket is half full by the time he looks back, partially with water and partially with disconcertingly active crawfish. Peeping black eyes peer out at him, and he starts coming up with excuses that will convince McCoy to let him carry the rake back instead. “How many more are you aiming for?”

“As many as will fit in that bucket,” McCoy says. “Unless you want to make the hike again tomorrow?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Kirk drawls, leaning back against a log. “I don’t think I’d mind that.” And he wouldn’t. The sound of the water is peaceful, though the tinny buzzing in his eyes tells him he might be itching from a bite or two in the morning.

“Says the person sitting on their ass.”

“If you needed a break, all you had to do was ask. _Old man_.” McCoy huffs at him and turns back to his work.

He fills the bucket quickly after that, and McCoy pauses to add a little more water before he wanders to Kirk’s side. He’s sweating through his shirt, thin tendrils of moisture trailing down his throat to his collar, and Kirk does start to feel a little bad about leaving him to the physical work while he lounged in the shade.

“Did you fall in while I wasn’t looking?” he teases, plucking at where the fabric is wicked to McCoy’s side.

Not bad enough to lose a good opportunity to pester.

“You try scraping the bottom of a river for an hour with a glorified trowel on a stick and see how _you_ come out.” He goes to smack Kirk’s hand away with a sour expression.

“I think looking _that_ sticky and miserable is a special talent all your own, Doctor,” Kirk says, and with a jolt he realizes that the hand that was pushing his away is now grasping his wrist with a grip tight enough to bruise.

A soldier instinct kicks in, years of training in classroom and out filtering out the background to the space of the cylinder of force trapping his wrist, _shit_ , if this is McCoy finally turning, like Spock and the rest of the infected crew he’s not ready for it, _stupidly_ let himself forget why they were here in the lull of the summer air, right, get his feet out from under him, left foot up and hook, and-

He barely manages to catch the shift as McCoy’s expression turns into one of surprise before they’re both tumbling backwards into the creek. The force of McCoy’s interrupted movement launches Kirk into a spin and he lands with his back in the water, sputtering to clear the splash that threatens to flood his nostrils. A heavy weight lands on his legs with an _oofh_ , and when he’s satisfied that his eyes are clear, he opens them to find McCoy sprawled across his knees, wheezing and clutching at his side.

“You’ve got remarkably- _heuugh-_ sharp joints for someone your size.”

“Were you… trying to _push me in_?”

“I’d say I succeeded,” McCoy corrects, then clears his throat and coughs again. “Guess I should have expected you’d put up a fight about it though, considering our earlier conversation. My own damn fault for underestimating those reflexes.”

“But now you’re all wet too.”

McCoy half shrugs, still leaning most of his weight onto Kirk’s legs. “Like you said, I was drenched before. Didn’t figure you’d pull me down with you, but this is actually... pretty nice. Compared to being covered in sweat, I mean.”

“Now you’re just covered in bog slime.”

“Look who’s talking,” says McCoy, and as he shifts to reach out towards Kirk’s head he can feel their legs brush underwater, the movement like a phantom eel against Kirk’s thigh, and he shivers involuntarily. The water is cold, bracingly so despite the midday heat, and he feels the warmth from McCoy’s chest as he leans closer. He can’t help it, he shifts backward, the proximity too much after the adrenaline of sudden confrontation, and to his surprise McCoy follows. The heat chases him until his elbows are submerged and there’s nowhere to lean.

With methodical fingers, McCoy cards some of the gunk from Kirk’s hair, and when they come away droplets of water land on Kirk’s nose and cheeks. He blinks.

“I wonder what all those women would think of you now,” McCoy says, too softly, and everything is too close, too hot and too cold and he needs to get out of this creek _now_. Kirk sits up with a jolt and McCoy surrenders the space, sitting back on his haunches so Kirk can breathe again.

He tries to laugh off what was obviously, definitely a joke a joke at his expense, because those he understands, and he doesn’t understand anything else about what just happened. “I think it might actually score me some points. A hard-luck case who cleans up well at the end of the day. What woman could resist?”

“What woman, indeed?” and Kirk intends to retort, but McCoy is already standing and offering him a hand. “We should get back. Those crawdads won’t wait forev- oh.”

Kirk looks over at the bucket. It’s laying on its side with its mouth in the stream, all beady black eyes absent save two. One lonely crustacean remains, flicking its antennae as it ventures towards the running water. Within moments it joins its brethren, slipping back into the flow of the creek and out of sight.

Kirk grins sheepishly. “Guess we’re coming back tomorrow, then?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter ended up going a direction I... did not originally intend lol


	16. Act 2 - Chapter 11

They don’t come back tomorrow.

The first sensation Kirk registers upon stirring is wetness, so much of it he’s hysterically afraid that his dreams of falling, falling into dark water have followed him into the waking world. But the crash of the window pane against the frame jolts him fully into consciousness, and when his eyes clear of morning gumminess he sees that the usual sunshine on his feet has been replaced with a splotch of dampness that grows rounder by the second, deepening the tartan from navy to almost black.

The window bangs again and he shivers at the rush of cold air that follows. A few more droplets land in the space between his toes and he draws his feet up until they’ve escaped the path of the rain. He should sit up and close the window, prevent any more damage, but the patter of heavy rain unfettered by glass is intoxicating, and he finds himself still curled there ten minutes later, listening to its thudding fall and the roar of wind shaking the trees.

By the time he manages to drag himself up, the water has soaked all the way through to the mattress. He puts his bare feet on the floor and shudders as the chill of the wood soaks up from his heels into the small of his back, unfurling in a bone-deep wave that has him tempted to fall straight back beneath the covers. But he manages to rip the blankets from the bed and clumsily fold them over a chair before rushing to the wardrobe to grab the thickest socks he can find.

Pulling on a knit sweater, he makes his way to the hallway, wondering if tonight is the night he finally lights his grate, fire hazard be damned. When he opens the door, he’s startled to find McCoy staring straight back at him, his hands clasped around a steaming mug of what smells like lemon tea.

“For me?” he chokes out, trying to calm his racing heart.

“Didn’t want you to catch cold. Figured you’d probably left your window open.”

Kirk sniffs, not feeling at all sick until this very moment. “Did you get caught by it too?”

“Nope. Woke up at about 0300 and I could smell the storm coming. I would have told you to shut it, but you and I both know that letting you soak was safer for my limbs than waking you after a long day.”

“That’s very considerate, Bones.”

“I can be, on occasion. Come downstairs, I’ll show you the other things my consideration has prepared.”

Judging by the pungent smell of cinnamon wafting up the stairwell, Kirk can hazard a guess at what the first might be, and his stomach gives a painful lurch. His appetite has increased two-fold since coming here. Seems like nothing he eats satisfies for longer than a few hours.

They eat breakfast in silence, chewing thoughtfully on grits and listening to the rain tapping on the banisters of the porch. Bones says that the storm will probably last the day, and he purses his lips when Kirk retrieves the PADD from the parlor to confirm. Weather is almost entirely regulated by the environment branch of Earth’s government, but occasional anomalies like a summer storm will slip through undetected – a glitch in the system, but nothing unexpected for such a complicated system as climate control. 

The notification panel on the PADD confirms it as a short-lived aberration in the network. Kirk has long suspected those aberrations are intentional, their pattern too apparently random to actually be errors. Humans don’t appreciate the blue sky without a little rain, especially the rain that comes when you least expect it.

Still, it wrecks their plans, laid about the weather Kirk is already too accustomed to fetching electronically. That will have to wait until the rain clears.

“What did you and your sister do on rainy days?” he asks as McCoy scours the breakfast dishes with a round of steel wool. The subtle scraping is lost in the gentle drumbeat of the rain. He wraps his hands tighter around the dregs of the tea.

He hadn’t considered it before yesterday, but wisp of a thought has been niggling him all night, now fully formed into an idea. A plan.

He has a notion that the sister might be the key. He’s rarely seen anyone get the best of McCoy, save perhaps Spock, and even then it’s barely a slip in resolution. An older sister: unpleasant, cruel even, someone who McCoy avoided… it’s not much, but it’s more of a chink than he’s found in all their first few weeks here. And he can’t sit here, waiting for something to happen, tending their garden and letting McCoy grow more comfortable in the spell he’s under. He can’t afford complacency. It’s time to grab a shovel and start digging.

McCoy barely hesitates a moment before answering. “The usual sorts of things that children do when they’ve got nothing but an old house to entertain them. Pick fights, play games, tell stories. Get into trouble.” He grins softly. “I think my grandmother would’ve thrashed me if she ever found out how many burnt pinecones were stashed under my bed.”

Kirk hasn’t seen a pine tree of any sort since coming here. Did he miss grove along the path to the creek? But that question is eclipsed by a larger one:

“What on earth possessed you to do that?”

McCoy places the last dish into the rack and turns back to Kirk, a twinkle in his eyes. “Somebody told me if you wanted to open up a pinecone and get at the seeds inside, fire was the best way. But it was still a few years before I learned the laws of thermodynamics, and even _distribution_ of the heat wasn’t something I considered. I almost set my bed on fire more than once.”

“And? Did you get your seeds?”

“After all that trouble, all I got was one spindly thing, about this big.” He holds up his finger and thumb, outlining a marble-sized space. “I wasn’t really expecting much, but I planted it behind the house, and when I came back the next summer, it had sprung up into a hand-high sapling.”

Kirk clicks his tongue. “You must have magic in those green thumbs.”

McCoy laughs. “Not sure about that. But it did keep growing, so maybe that does count for something. Got all the way up to my shoulders, if you can believe it.”

“After the storm, I’d like to go outside and see this miracle tree.” McCoy’s expression fixes, the ghost of a smile still hanging on his taut mouth.

“You’ll need another miracle then. It blew down, on a day just like this. Went out back and found its stem snapped halfway to the base.” He looks contemplative. “It was always a bit frail. Never stood a chance, really.”

A tendril of wet air seeps between the cracks near the window, and Kirk shivers.  “Should we go into the parlor?” he asks finally, when McCoy shows no sign of continuing. “It’s getting cold. We can roast some more pinecones over the fire, if you’ve got any.” He smiles weakly, and McCoy’s face lights, as if something’s been rekindled behind his eyes.

“I might,” he breathes. “We could plant our own tree. The right way, this time.”

“The right way?” Kirk jokes. He hadn’t expected McCoy to be so eager. “No more singed bedsheets this time, then?”

“Right. No more singed bedsheets.” He puts a hand on Kirk’s shoulder and squeezes as he passes. His fingers are cold from the dishwater and Kirk shivers again, and the hair on his neck stands on end. “I’ve learned from my mistakes. We’ll grow a tree that outlives us both.”

\---

McCoy sets off into the blustering rain towards the shed in search of pinecones. There’s something whimsical in the idea that’s infectious – it’s just the sort of thing an eight-year-old version of himself had longed to do with someone. He’s not above indulging the childish side of himself that, occasionally, just wants to set things on fire to watch the flames.

The buoyancy in his chest can only hold for so long before he remembers, with a sickening sinking in his stomach, what he’d meant to do today, and it wasn’t roasting pinecones. He’s got to find something in this house that will help him cut McCoy so deeply that he comes back to himself. He’s got to wring the blank walls of their secrets.

If he succeeds, what will he get back? It feels like an age since they left Omicron Ceti Three, and in that time it’s like his memory has muddled with reality. The smiles that seemed so forced in that oppressively clear air are indistinguishable from the sly grins he’d known and returned in the years past. If he brings back Bones tonight, unaltered, cured, will he still want to sit by a fire with Kirk and listen to the rain? Or will that be the end of all this, and will he be back in San Francisco tomorrow, and the Enterprise the week after?

To be children, for just one day – it wouldn’t be so bad. To wait one more day. To pretend everything is as it should be. Just one day more.

But it won’t be just one day. It’s been over twenty already. He has to be rational here. If this were any other crewmember he wouldn’t be being so… _selfish_. He’d be angrily, insistently, unfalteringly pursuing a cure, not basking in his subordinate’s illness just because, by some stroke of luck, everything he never knew he wanted is falling into his lap.

He isn’t being kind to anyone but himself by delaying. No matter what McCoy keeps saying, he doesn’t get to take off his captain’s hat just because he hasn’t got a ship’s deck beneath his feet. Solid ground isn’t an excuse for dereliction of duty, and he has a duty to McCoy, and to his whole crew, to solve this issue in an efficient manner. To return to the stars, that don’t shine as bright through Georgia’s trees at they did in the open Iowan sky. To get them all home safe.

He stands, and leaves the crackling fire and parlor behind him as he heads for the stairs.

To his duty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh shit things are finally starting to happen
> 
> Happy thanksgiving all!


	17. Act 2 - Chapter 12

The floor creaks beneath his socked feet as Kirk ascends the staircase. He’s not sure he’ll be able to distinguish that sound from the cacophony of other creaks that the wind is currently dragging from the house’s frame, but it’s as good an early warning system as he’s going to get. When he reaches the top, he turns right instead of his usual turn left, heading down the bare corridor whose length he hasn’t explored since their first few days of cleaning.

The door to the master bedroom is solidly shut. When Kirk turns the pewter handle, he half expects (hopes) that it will be locked – it seems fancy enough to require one of those old-fashioned mechanical key mechanisms – but the door swings open with barely a groan. Trying not to feel too much like a peeping tom, he steps inside.

The master bedroom is nothing like the single room they occasionally shared back at the Academy. It’s nearly three times the size, for starters, with plenty of open space for rugs between the pieces of furniture. The room looks untouched since they first opened it, despite McCoy’s occupancy. The bed, chaise, and wardrobe are all where he remembers them. The coverlets are neatly made, with tight corners and the top sheet pulled down. His mother would be proud.

If it weren’t for the collection of clothes piled onto a chair, Kirk would almost think the place was unoccupied. Though he himself has little to decorate his own room with, he’d thought McCoy might have rummaged through the closets and pulled out something to hang on the walls. There’s a full-length mirror against one side, but besides that, they’re still as bare as the corridors.

He rummages through the wardrobe, but only finds the same clothes, minus a few shirts that McCoy has obviously borrowed from his grandfather’s collection, because he recognizes them hanging on the chair. Lucky that their sizes match so well.

There’s a little dresser in the corner, but those drawers are virtually bare. His searching hands close on nothing but a small woven bracelet and a few twigs in the lowest drawer.

It doesn’t feel like McCoy’s room. It doesn’t have that sort of warmth he’s come to associate with the man’s space: a lived-in quality that comes with scattered antiques and artwork collected in their years on the Enterprise, or the haphazard piles of books and mismatched pillows of their Academy days. It’s too… clean.

_Or maybe_ , a niggling thought pesters, _the reason it feels so cold is that you haven’t been invited in._

He won’t give up just yet. If this room isn’t what he’s looking for, then he needs to find the room that holds the true McCoy. He’ll figure out which room was Bones’ when he was a child. That’s at least something concrete to work towards.

Still no sound of footsteps on the stairs. Small mercies.

He closes the door to the master bedroom and surveys the hallway. He knows what the first door on his right is: the other bedroom with a double mattress. If not Bones’ room, it might have been Leslie’s. That too would be something to go on.

When he opens the door he finds the bedroom stripped. Gone are the cream sheets and blankets, and the curtains are drawn, shutting out any semblance of light save that from the hallway.

They’d stripped all the beds, of course, and beaten them out to clear the dust and evict any insects who’d taken up residency in the absence of human occupants, but he’d assumed McCoy had redone this room after finishing his own. Evidently, he’d been wrong.

Sighing, he slumps down onto the plain mattress. Damn this grandmother, or whoever had cleaned the house so thoroughly after her death. At this rate, he’ll never find a thing. Nothing but plain cream wallpaper over plain walls…

Plain walls with _holes_. He gets up, suddenly alert.

When things disappear, some trace always remains of their absence.

Tacks must have once hung something: frames or posters, judging by the lighter squares on the wallpaper, untouched by grime. Kirk traces the outline of the largest square with his fingers. He’s never known McCoy to hang anything on his walls, preferring decorations that sit on flat surfaces. This probably isn’t his room. It could have been a guest bedroom, or Leslie’s – it’s too soon to tell.

What else? He turns his attention to the closet. The slatted door opens to the emptiness he’s come to expect, but he walks forward eagerly anyway.

There. Clothes hangers, thirty or so of them pushed off to one side. Far too many for the convenience of a guest. And there – a pink splotch marring the wallpaper. It looks almost like a waterstain, tainted with red ink. Like someone had hung something red to dry straight out of the wash.

This had to be used regularly, be someone’s bedroom, at least at one point.

He grins as Spock’s voice rings in his head. _Most logical, Captain._ He’s no Sherlock Holmes, but at last he’s getting somewhere.

Energized, he continues scouring the room. Where else can he check? Maybe under the bed.

That idea doesn’t turn up anything but cobwebs and a mouthful of dust, but as he pushes himself back up off the floor, his fingers fall upon an irregular spot in the wood. He looks down at his hand. Etched into the floorboards are grooves in two narrow, curving tracks. He traces their path on hands and knees, from the spot beside the bed all the way to the door, but they taper off and dissipate at the threshold.

Something was dragged from this room. It’s impossible to tell the direction of movement based solely on the marks, but based on the fact that the corner they originate now stands empty, he has to assume whatever caused them, it was taken out, not in.

He wants there to be a giant epiphany there, but in the end it doesn’t tell him much of anything. The house has stood for decades, if not hundreds of years. This room has probably served multiple purposes, and there’s no way to date the scratches. The dust doesn’t look too deeply settled in the grooves, but someone could have cleaned the floor at any point. Realistically, there’s nothing he can conclude from it.

When he ventures back to the hallway, he finally hears the telltale creak of the door downstairs, and the accompanying rush of wind before it’s shut. There’s the signal he was looking for. At least he hasn’t been caught snooping. He stares forlornly down the hallway. There are other rooms he’d like to investigate, blank doors leading to clues he can’t predict, but there’s no time now. He’ll have to look for another chance, another excuse in the future.

He goes downstairs. McCoy hasn’t found the pinecones, but he doesn’t seem too put out. His hair is longer than Kirk has ever seen it, growing farther from military brusqueness every day, and all of it is plastered by rainwater against his forehead. The wet cat look is endearing, and he wishes desperately for Spock to be here in this moment, to make some sort of quip and see McCoy sputter. But there’s only them, and he helps his friend out of the soaked flannel and under a blanket, and goes to fetch a new cup of tea from the kitchen.

\---

The storm is close to blowing itself out by the time he heads up to bed. His sheets are mostly dry, dry enough at least to be worth putting back on his bed. He checks the latch on the window before going to brush his teeth. It’s held firm despite the day’s battering.

He comes back with matches and a small pile of kindling and larger firewood. The storm may be abating, but it’s still cold and damp and definitely worth recalling his wilderness survival training to build himself a little fire in the empty grate. He’s done next to nothing all day, but somehow he’s still exhausted.

Kirk kneels beside the grate, intent on clearing whatever ashes remain there to make room for his own construction, but his blackened hand pauses over the last piece of charcoal. He pinches it between two fingers and drags it from where it’s stuck between two bars. It’s decayed, both from fire and time, but the shape is unmistakeable, the flaps of bark turned outwards pressing into his palm before shattering into ash and falling to the floor.

He looks behind him, seeing the room with new eyes.

McCoy’s room.


	18. Act 2 - Chapter 13

The next day dawns sunny and warm, which means there’s no time to investigate his newfound revelation in the light of day – there’s a garden to check on.

Thankfully, none of the plants have sprouted yet, and their careful watering the week before ensured the topsoil stayed put even under the wind’s duress. All in all, McCoy concludes, there’s not much damage done.

The house and clearing haven’t faired so well, however. The storm was strong enough to knock down branches of all sizes, and though McCoy swears the walls are reinforced with modern materials strong enough to withstand the weather, Kirk can’t help but wonder if a badly timed gust could have knocked a branch straight through a window if they were less fortunate.

As it is, no debris managed to penetrate the walls during the night, but they have their work cut out for them clearing what lies scattered on the ground. The first priority is the garden of course, but the porch has its fair share, and Kirk would feel better about the pathway to the house at least being clear. Something something regulations, something something at least one viable exit in the event of an emergency, medical or otherwise. If he can’t trust McCoy to be the voice of sense at the moment, it falls to him to be it in his stead. That’s what being a captain is all about, right?

He thinks he’ll get a chance to run back up to his room, _Bones’_ room – he has to remind himself – before dinner, but instead McCoy drags him to the table for a round of cards, and he can’t find a good excuse to skive off. Four rounds of gin rummy later and the roast is smoking sweetly in the oven and he curses himself for leaving his PADD downstairs the night before, sitting in plain sight and incapable of being a justification for a jaunt upstairs.

Dinner, and a drink, and _finally_ , with the light of a candle his only guide, he’s climbing the stairs to bed, and to whatever secrets await.

They’ve been here nearly a month now, long enough to burn the imprint of the room in his mind, dulling its unique features with familiarity. What seemed fascinating on his first day is now relegated to the realm of the mundane, and he has to unsee what he’s come to know to assess what he might have missed.

An inventory of the room’s contents:

  1. One double bed: white sheets and tartan blue-green quilt, two pillows cool to the touch from the wind that creeps through the cracks in the wall.
  2. Two nightstands: an oil lamp atop one that’s not been fueled for decades, the other piled with the books Kirk has scavenged from the parlor but not gotten to reading yet.
  3. One little desk and wicker chair: current residence for Kirk’s discarded clothes, single empty drawer.
  4. Two windows: one above the bed, the other on the far side of the room that stubbornly refuses to open no matter the force applied.
  5. One wardrobe: filled with an assortment of clothing Bones had donated to the cause of Kirk’s utter unpreparedness for the variable weather.
  6. Assorted knickknacks retrieved from the corners and crannies: a weathered baseball trapped behind the wardrobe, a flimsy bookmark with an inappropriately sinister quote from Revelations, an old mechanical clock lain on its side on the desk with its innards excised for parts.
  7. Six pieces of fresh firewood: sitting untouched beside the grate.



The odds and ends he dumps on the bed, and after shoving the wardrobe back into place he surveys the room again, tries to picture what it might have looked like to a 10 year old’s eyes. A change in perspective might be the answer. He drops to his knees.

From this vantage, the windowsills are at eye level and, only feeling mildly silly, he crawls forward to peer out at the trees. He looks for the space where the old pine tree might have once stood, but finds nothing of interest.

He’s not as young as he once was, and eventually his knees collapse underneath him, with a burning sensation in his thighs reminding him that his bi-weekly visits to the Enterprise’s gym have ceased. He sighs, about ready to despair. With nothing new here, he’s not sure where else to turn.

There’s writing on the underside of the windowsill.

The letters are faint, barely more than an imprint of words, but with enough squinting Kirk can make them out. In a childish hand, blocky text reads simply:

_Here there be dragons._

Beside the inscription are vague scribbles that might be meant as flames. Following their path downward, his eyes fix on the way the final floorboard rests unevenly against the base of the wall. Interested, he digs his nails into the raised edge and it comes away easily, revealing the edge of wooden joists and the flat panes of the ceiling of the room below. Nestled in the narrow space between the supports are a book and another woven bracelet, the pattern eerily similar to the one he’d found in the master bedroom.

He sets the bracelet aside and pulls out the book.

The cover is cracked with age but he can still make out the title when he blows away the dust. It’s a tome of fairytales. He gently folds it open to the first page. A girlish script embellishes the simple caption on the cover page.

_To ~~Loen~~ Leonard. Happy birthday. _

The text is just as childlike as the inscription on the windowsill, but the book itself is far beyond the vocabulary of its gifter. The first tale is familiar – Little Red Riding Hood – but the prose is flowing and articulate and obviously intended for someone in their early teens. As he turns the pages, a sampling of dried leaves falls into his lap, only just preserved by time. They crumble at his touch.

A gift from Leslie? It has to be, which means the writing on the windowsill is probably McCoy’s.

The gift is too tender to jive with his knowledge of their existing strained relationship, and the fact that it was hidden indicates it was something McCoy held precious. If he understands then, they must have been close as children, and grown apart as they got older. Clearly, McCoy relished their earlier relationship enough to hide the evidence beneath the floorboards, somewhere safe from the rest of the world.

He was right. Leslie is the key. A deteriorating relationship with a once-cherished sister, a feeling of disconnection from childhood comforts. McCoy’s parents were gone before they met, but he knows the story of his father’s death, how Bones was the one to pull the plug, how it still eats him up inside. All that’s left is Leslie. Maybe Kirk isn’t the only one afraid to call what’s left of his family.

Tomorrow. They’ll have it out tomorrow, and it will be painful for both of them, but it will be done, and they can return to the lives they had before. As he climbs into bed, he practices the conversation in his head, no less prepared than for any diplomatic encounter he’s taken part in. He carefully rehearses every response to the imaginary McCoy’s misdirections, chooses a setting that guarantees no escape route, selects the spots he can punch that will cause the least damage in case McCoy gets violent. He keys his communiques to Starfleet, requesting the Enterprise’s return, ready to send the moment he has confirmation that the spores have been eradicated. With that done, he finally rolls over, body singing with anticipation.

It’ll all be over, tomorrow.

The breeze rustles the pages of the books on his nightstand. The clock lies silent at the foot of the bed. When he wakes, it’ll be to the smell of coffee. He’ll come downstairs to see his best friend waiting for him, breakfast at the ready, and nothing on his schedule but tending the garden. No responsibility, no death, no worlds to save.

Tomorrow will be the last time.

He can’t bring himself to feel the gladness he knows he should.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Penultimate chapter of Act 2, all! The ball's finally started rolling :)


	19. Act 2 - Chapter 14

Kirk wonders how many more bottles of cordial are stashed in the cupboards; there seems to be no end of them. It’s not all they drink – gin and bourbon are vices he’s happy to indulge in on a cold night – but they always end with a little glass of the sweet nectar. It warms him down to his toes. Maybe when they return to the Enterprise, he can convince McCoy to take a crate along with them. This is one of many rituals from their time here he’d be happy to preserve.

Kirk only takes a small sip tonight before setting the glass down. The contents glow amber in the firelight, and he lets himself be distracted by the swirling lines in the drink. He’d rather not concentrate on McCoy, who sits peacefully in the armchair across from him, reading a book on some revolution in the 22nd century and humming lightly to himself. Replace the book with a medical text and this could be any night in the library commons, the two of them studying in companionable silence. He rehearses the beginning of the end one more time in his head, but he knows he’s just delaying. He knows what he has to say. It’s only a matter of having the fortitude to say it.

Indecision. It will kill you in the Captain’s chair. He won’t let it kill this chance.

“You have a nephew, right?” he says. No point in beating around the bush. McCoy looks up. The book falls open on his lap.

“Yes. Tommy.”

“How old is he?”

“Must be about three now.” He regards Kirk quizzically. “Why do you ask?”

“When’s the last time you saw him?” Kirk asks, but he’s certain he’s already knows the answer, and the way McCoy’s expression darkens tells him he’s right.

“He was born in the Vega colonies. Haven’t made it out there yet.”

“Why not?” he says, twisting the words into a mockery of McCoy’s own inquiry all those weeks ago. “You had the time, didn’t you?”

McCoy narrows his eyes. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“Yes, but didn’t you want to see your nephew, your _only_ nephew?”

“Of course I did.”

“Really,” Kirk scoffs. McCoy closes the book and places it on the table, looking at Kirk intently.

Kirk pauses, the next words fizzling on his tongue. He’d been expecting a misdirect, a vacant smile, some sort of vague assurance that all things were as they should be. The only contingency he hadn’t planned for was McCoy’s solemn engagement.

“You going somewhere with this?” His voice is steady and low, and though he doesn’t sound angry, there’s a hint of warning there that sends thrills through Kirk’s stomach, a heady mixture of nerves and relief. He’s hit somewhere close to base, it seems.

It’s working.

“Just wondering. You said I should have gone home to see my family, while you didn’t even bother dropping in to see your infant nephew?”

“Like I said, they were far away. And besides, my sister- wasn’t up for any visits.”

“And why’s that?”

“It’s… not something I’d like to discuss,” McCoy says, turning his head towards the side of the room. Kirk doesn’t surrender an inch.

“No, I didn’t think so. But I think I wanna know why somebody so sanctimonious about the importance of humanity would walk out on his family like that. Do you even care about your sister at all?”

McCoy’s eyes flash. “Jim-” he warns, starting to rise from his chair. Kirk beats him to it, placing himself firmly between McCoy and the route to the door.

“If you don’t care, then that’s fine, but don’t pretend to be the better man about it. Are you really that petty?”

It’s a dangerous feeling in the air, and he finds himself bracing again. Fight, or run. He hasn’t got an option this time. Fight it is.

“You never loved her at all, did you?”

He feels the punch the moment before it impacts, and though he steps back in time, the shape of knuckles still stings where they grazed the edge of his chin. McCoy’s leg hits the table and he stumbles. Kirk’s discarded glass topples and spills the last remaining drops of cordial onto the hardwood.

Kirk circles the table, heart pounding as he watches McCoy struggle to right himself from the ill-placed blow. He’s done it. Finally, the rise he couldn’t get on the ship is happening. He just needs to deliver the final hit, one inexcusable comment that pitches the fever to a frenzy, and he knows which card to play. It’s been the one he’s been holding onto, hoping to God he wouldn’t need it.

“When you killed your father, did you wish it was Leslie in his place?”

McCoy stills, still bent halfway over the coffee table, and when he finally stands his hands fall loosely to his sides. Kirk remains tense, ready for any advance.

“I know what you’re doing.” Gone is any trace of anger. It’s replaced with a weariness that sends Kirk reeling.

“What am I doing?” he parrots dumbly, for lack of anything better to say. His head is underwater.

_I failed._

“I’m a doctor, Jim, goddamn it. I know I’ve been sick, and you think you’re curing me. I’m trying to tell you… I can’t be cured.”

“Bullshit,” Kirk breathes. He refuses to let his voice crack. “I won’t let you give up-”

“I didn’t say anything, because I knew it would hurt you, and I wanted to believe… we could hold onto this for just a little bit longer. You can’t cure me, Jim, because there’s nothing left to cure.”

“What the hell does that mean?” he says, more quietly than he intends. No contingency plans. No nothing. This was his last hope.

McCoy sighs. “It means that I’ve _been_ cured, or at least as far as I can tell. Whatever spell those plants had on me has cleared up since we came to Georgia. I’m as sane as I’ve ever been.”

“No way. This is a… a trick.”

“No trick. I promise you, Jim, it’s no trick/”

“Then why won’t you leave the farm? Why the hell wouldn’t you tell me if we could both get off this rock?”

“Because I wanted… I _want_ to stay.”

“Yes, you definitely sound all better,” Kirk deadpans.

“I know this isn’t going to be easy to hear, but I need you to listen to me. No fungus is telling me to say this. It’s just me, saying that I want to stay here. It was the spores that made me want to come in the first place, but it’s not what kept me here.”

Kirk can’t believe his ears. This has to be a trick, but…

Hasn’t he seen the same change? McCoy’s grown more like himself with each day since they arrived. To deny that would be just as irrational as to accept his words at face value.

“Let’s say I believe this isn’t just the spores talking,” Kirk says. He doesn’t lower his hands. “Why would you want to stay? Why wouldn’t you want to come back?”

At this, McCoy laughs quietly. “Have you met me, Jim? The first time we spoke, I was damn near ready to hurl on your lap just from a cargo shuttle flight. Space has never called to me, not in the way it calls most Starfleet folks. I’m glad for the adventures we’ve had, but to actually be home on solid ground again, it’s never been clearer: I’ve had my fill of it.”

“Fill of what?”

“ _Everything_. The perfectly clean ship, the transporters, the fake food, the constant life-and-death. Do you know that in all my practice on Earth, I never lost a patient? How many people have died under my hands since joining Starfleet? How many friends?”

“That’s the sacrifice we all make,” Kirk says, but it feels like he’s just playing back what his professors told him, what Pike told him, and he’s not sure he recognizes his own voice in the din.

“For what? I’ve given Starfleet a lot in my time. I don’t owe them my whole life, my happiness.”

“Then why didn’t you drop out of the Academy?” Kirk shoots back. “Why not quit after your first practical, if you hated it all so much? Why sign on to the Enterprise? Why the hell would you agree to a five year mission if you’d rather have been back here?”

“You’re an idiot.” McCoy says, and his voice is softer. He takes a step forward. Kirk takes one back. “If you don’t know, then you’re an absolute idiot.”

“People keep on telling me that…”

He’s two feet away, then one. There’s nowhere else for Kirk to move – he’s backed into the wall. McCoy raises a hand and Kirk flinches. But instead of another punch, the palm cups his cheek below his ear. He swallows.

“You know.” And McCoy gives him a moment to move away before he leans in.

Kirk doesn’t move.

The pressure of a mouth against his is old and new at once, familiar and alien. He can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t do anything but feel the weight of McCoy’s body against his and the cold of the wall at his back. It’s too brief to comprehend, and McCoy is already pulling away and giving him room to breathe before his mind can finish tracing the movement of lips, or comprehend the sparks that tumble from every point where their bodies touched a moment ago.

“I know I can’t ask you to stay with me,” McCoy murmurs. “But you don’t know how much I want you to.” His eyes are sad, and so, so familiar.

It’s him. It’s Bones. It has to be.

“I can’t,” says Kirk.

“I know.”

The space behind his eyes is burning. Bones turns to leave.

“I want to.” And he finds, as he says it, that he means it. Means it more than he ever thought he could. Damn Starfleet, damn responsibility, damn everything. He wants to be right here.

“Then stay with me, for as long as you can.”

The burden on his chest is lightened, and replaced with a new load in its place.

“Ok,” he says. “Ok.”

When Bones grasps his hand, he doesn’t pull back, and when he leans forward, Kirk closes the final inch.

The aftertaste is of peaches, sweet to his tongue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thought process at the end of writing this chapter was essentially, "well shit, I guess THAT just happened". The chars hijacked my keyboard, truthfully, but I think we all ended up in the same place in the end :)
> 
> End of Act 2! Thanks to everyone who's stuck with me so far! One more act to go...


	20. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another look back before we move forward into the final act.

_It becomes a habit, to the point that Kirk barely remembers the smell of his own sheets. He spends classes daydreaming instead of coarse-grained corduroy and the must of day-old tea on the coffee table. If his roommate is in a temper, he spends the night. If they stay up studying, he sleeps over. If he needs a partner to practice a presentation, Bones is a listening ear. Sometimes the thought of fresh coffee is enough to have him lounging on the couch by the time Bones gets back from class._

_He’d feel worse for imposing, but as much as Bones half-heartedly grumbles his dissent as Kirk drops in, yet again unannounced, he also drops his PADD on Kirk’s desk with unsubtle frequency, begging a fresh pair of eyes for a paper choked on too much caffeine and too little inspiration. He meets him at the dining hall for dinner and while it’s Kirk who plays tag-a-long as they stroll back towards Bones’ room, it’s Bones who brings up a fresh contentious point under the eves that forces Kirk to follow him in and keeps them up arguing until the early hours. It’s Bones who remembers to set the alarm just a bit earlier on Thursdays so Kirk doesn’t miss his morning seminar._

_They aren’t roommates by the accord of the Academy, but by the end of their first year they may as well be. The RA who finds that out is kind enough to let it slide in exchange for pilfered exam results and he can deal with the snide remarks from his real roommate about his presumed sexual habits so long as he doesn’t have to see the guy more than once every few nights. It works for them. They enjoy each other’s company, and neither has the time to pursue anything serious with anyone who might get jealous over their arrangement._

_Even though his second-year roommate is a huge step up from the first - Andorian, polite, impeccable personal hygiene - after that first walk of shame he still finds himself standing on a familiar doorstep. The lock is reset after the year’s turn, but it only takes four knocks for the muffled sound of socked feet shuffling towards the door to grace his ears. The blanket is already folded neatly at the edge of the couch. He doesn’t even need to ask._

_On the Enterprise, there are no walks of shame, no late night study sessions. Corduroy is replaced by sleek vinyl and for the first time in his life, he can’t hear the traipsing of anyone in the room beside him._

_His room is stark, peaceful, and all to himself. Just as a Captain’s quarters should be._


	21. Act 3 - Chapter 1

“Coming?”

“Give me half a moment.”

McCoy tosses a final handful of soil over the bare patch in the garden, covering the last remaining vestige of the storm’s damage, then straightens up. “Alright, ready. Lead the way.”

Every few steps, Kirk glances backward, half-afraid that he’ll find himself alone on the trail, but McCoy is ever only a step or two behind. After a time, he begins to whistle, a tune Kirk doesn’t recognize. It’s a beacon at his back, and eventually the sound is enough to keep his eyes forward without fear.

The fields roll out before them, and he can’t help but feel they’re so much brighter with another set of steps rustling the fringes of the grass. He shoulders his bag, its woven weight light on his back. The load will be lighter this week on the trip back, with McCoy here to take his fair share of the burden.

They round the corner and the house and trees become nothing more material than a speck of green against the sky. Though he knows logically the creek was farther than this, encased in the trees it had felt as though if they’d taken one wrong turn they’d have happened upon their clearing and garden, like Baba Yaga’s hut rising from the gloom. Out here in the open fields, the distance is impossible to deny.

With every step, Kirk’s heart grows lighter. The still-niggling weight of doubt lifts in proportion to their distance from the house, each pace proving the truth of the situation – McCoy really can leave the farm without being compelled to return. There’s no hair pulling or screeching or sudden reluctance. If anything, McCoy’s whistling grows more cheerful the farther they walk.

“What song is that?” he asks.

McCoy pauses. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten? You’re the one who taught it to me.”

Kirk wracks his brain, but for the life of him he can’t place the tune. “When was this?”

McCoy furrows his brow. “Years ago, I thought.” He looks almost offended and Kirk smiles placatingly.

“Don’t hold me to anything I taught you while I was drunk.”

Bones chuckles and resumes his whistling.

Soon enough they’re on the edge of town. They’re here, and Kirk feels like dancing.

“We made it.” He throws an arm around McCoy’s shoulders and squeezes. McCoy scrunches his nose.

“No need to act so damned surprised about it.” But he makes no attempt to shrug Kirk off, and out of the corner of his eye Kirk can see the corners of his mouth quirking.

The general store looks just as plain and sterile as the last time he came. Through the window, he can see that the rude shopkeeper is sitting behind the counter, expression sour as ever, and Kirk groans inwardly. He’d been hoping for the daughter today. Nothing for it, though. Kirk makes to go in, but pauses when he realizes the footsteps behind him have fallen silent.

“Actually,” says Bones, “can I meet you here in half an hour? I’ve got an errand I’d like to run.”

“I could come with you. I don’t think this will take long,” he says, not particularly wanting to let Bones out of his site on their first joint venture into town, but he just smiles mischievously.

“’Fraid not, this is something I’d rather do alone, if it’s all the same to you.”

He crosses his arms. “Bones, what’s going on?”

McCoy’s eyes twinkle. “Oh, you’ll find out in good time. Now, run along. I’ll see you in a bit.” And with that, he turns on his heel and heads down the street.

Kirk feels compelled to follow, but he forces himself to tear his eyes away and head back toward the general store. McCoy is fine, hasn’t this jaunt already proven it? He can’t be a babysitter for the rest of his life, watching over his shoulder to make sure Bones is alright. Weeks of paranoia are written into his bones now, but he’ll have to unlearn them at some point. Might as well make a start now.

The shopping trip is uneventful, other than the same hateful glare from the shopkeeper. It seems they’ve moved on from snide comments to the silent treatment. Kirk isn’t sure which is worse. While he wasn’t a fan of inscrutable backhanded insults, it’s uniquely unsettling to greet a fellow human and get nothing in return, not even a head nod. He packs his groceries in silence, given up on any attempts at civility.

He’s almost out the door when the shopkeeper finally speaks. “Yellow-bellied _bastard_.”

“I’m sorry?” he says, trying to turn back, but another shopper pushes past him and he finds himself out the door before he can even tell if the man was talking to him.

“Got everything?”

He spins, and McCoy is there waiting for him, a flat parcel wrapped in brown paper tucked under his arm. The door bangs closed behind him, shutting the shopkeeper from view.

“I think so,” he says, pushing the man’s comment from his mind. “And you? What did you get?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Really? And you can’t even give me a hint about it?”

“That would ruin the fun.”

“Bones, the man of mystery.”

“I like that.” McCoy grins. “Nice to know I can still surprise you, after all these years.”

“You never stop surprising me,” he says, and though he’s teasing, it’s the truth.

“All good surprises, I hope.”

“Naturally. Shall we?”

“Of course.”

The walk back is a cheerful one, and when McCoy starts whistling again, though Kirk still swears he doesn’t know the tune, he finds himself humming along.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're in the home stretch, all! Chapters, and time, are running out...


	22. Act 3 - Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is another chapter I must have re-written 3 times before I was vaguely satisfied with it. 
> 
> There's just something about sitting out in the cool evening air of the country that's an indescribable feeling. It's literally the only thing about [being forced to go to] summer camp that I miss (the rest will be relegated to the back of my mind, never to be thought of again).

The mosquitos have for once made different plans than hanging around the house, and it’s Kirk who suggests sitting out on the porch after dinner. They forgo the cordial for a night, opting instead for a newly-acquired fifth of whiskey. After a time, McCoy pulls out a tin of what Kirk takes for tobacco.

“Really, Bones?” he asks. “I didn’t think a doctor-”

McCoy flips the lid of the tin open, revealing a score of round mints. “After dinner treat. My grandmother used to keep them in her purse. They’re good for keeping kids quiet during church.”

Kirk takes one. It’s chalky and breaks apart easily when he chews, leaving a taste is not nearly as musty as he’d expect from something lying about an old house for that many years, but still slightly off. McCoy pops a couple in his mouth and sucks. Ah. He takes another and does the same, letting the mint roll around on his tongue. The flavour transforms into something smoother as he savours the candy. McCoy laughs at his surprised expression.

“Like I said, good for keeping children quiet.”

The whiskey tastes strange against the lingering mint, but Kirk swallows it all the same. He’s keenly aware of the space between them, and how little of it there is. One cushion of room in a vast state, on a vast continent. He’s used to dealing in lightyears and solar systems. This is too close for comfort.

It’s been over a week since that night in the parlor. They haven’t discussed it, not really. If he’d thought the prospect of having it out with McCoy was frightening, the thought of exploring _…_ whatever _this_ is… Well, it’s the most terrified he’s been in his life.

It’s not that he hadn’t thought about it, in an off-handed sort of way. A shared joke, a drunken touch softer that it had any right to be, a night spent staring too long at the empty side of a bed. But it’s one of those things he put aside out for the sheer impossibility of it all. It was a passing thought, meant for the occasional daydream but never to be mentioned in the light of day. There was so much more to lose there than with anyone he’d ever dated. His deepest friendship wasn’t something he was willing to risk on a what-if.

Of course, once he was made captain, regulations sealed the door to that particular vault permanently. For all sorts of obvious ethical reasons, commanders don’t initiate relationships with their subordinates unless they want the wrath of Starfleet raining down on their heads. It’s a court-martial level offense, or at least enough to get one or both parties transferred. Not to speak of the fact that technically, as chief medical officer Bones is the only crewmember who holds the power to relieve the Captain of duty. Talk about an unholy mess of conflicts-of-interest.

And yet, here they are. Kirk doesn’t know what he’s permitted to do. What he can permit _himself_ to do. Out here, there’s no set of regulations to fall back on, and Starfleet Command is a world away. Just him now. Him and his choices.

“Did you mean it? When you said you wanted to stay?”

He takes a breath after finishing. So begins the plunge into the unknown.

Bones considers him a moment. “I did.” He takes a final sip of whiskey and sets the tumbler down on the railing, then angles his body towards Kirk: open, unthreatening. They’re a hair’s breath closer than they were before. Kirk downs his own glass in one gulp. “I know you don’t understand that, but-”

“I do!” Kirk blurts out. “At least… I think I can understand. I mean, there’ve been times I’ve thought about leaving too.”

“I know.” Kirk raises his eyebrows. “Oh, you haven’t said it much out loud, but don’t think I can’t read you like a book after all these years. Why do you think I’ve been pushing you?” Kirk huffs. “Jim, I’m not trying to force you into anything. I just want you to see what I see. Just because you signed up for something, you aren’t obligated to keep at it for the rest of your life. There are always options.”

The first sprouts are pushing past the tip of the soil, their peaks only barely visible in the moonlight. When his leave runs out, they’ll have barely finished a single harvest. He stares at them, and thinks.

What are his options?

He could leave now. Bones is well, in sound mind, more than self-sufficient. He can replant all on his own. There’s no medical reason Kirk has to stay. There’s only the sickness in his stomach at the thought of not being here tomorrow.

He could leave at the end of his three months. Eat up the rest of his leave and return empty-handed, but with a clear conscience. The new surgeon will be ingratiated into the crew by that point, and if he knows anything about the Enterprise’s draw, she’ll be happy to stay on past her temporary term. Life will go on, and by the time he returns to Earth at the end of their five year mission the whole of the clearing, from bench to porch, will be flowering under McCoy’s gentle touch.

He could stay. Go back to San Francisco, submit himself to tests to prove his mental wellness, tender his resignation, and be back in time for dinner. Live a quiet life, eat food grown by his own hand, vacation on a transport vessel when he misses the stars.

When McCoy shifts, he feels the rocking from his own end of the bench.

If he stayed, there wouldn’t have to be any space between them.

“Do you want to see what I bought today?” McCoy says, as if he hadn’t been expecting an answer. He probably wasn’t.

“Of course.”

“It’s there, in the chest.”

As far as he knows, neither of them has touched the chest since they arrived. Kirk’s been too reverent to rest a drink or his feet on its carved surface. He can’t shake the feeling that it meant something more to someone. With permission granted, he slides off the bench and kneels in front of the chest. It’s twice his width. Whoever carved the patterns into the oak, it must have taken months, and the painting even longer. Each tulip is filled with delicate swirls of colour, intertwining to form scenes in miniature: a princess with long golden hair, a knight with his sword drawn, a little girl lost in the woods. The lid cracks open easily, hinges creaking only a little.

Inside, he finds the package from earlier, still wrapped. The rest of the chest is empty. He draws it out and pulls at the paper. It comes away in loose sheaves, revealing the gift inside.

It’s a picture frame. Not a fancy one, just a wooden frame with a red velvet back: simple and solid.

“I know you were complaining that the walls around here were pretty bare. I figured we could start decorating, if you wanted.”

He shouldn’t be speechless over something this simple, but it’s like the choice he’s been too paralyzed to make is sitting right in his hands.

Bones continues as he continues to turn the frame over in his hands. “Of course, if you wanted to stay true to tradition, you could just leave it back in the chest.”

“What, here?” He looks down at the base of the empty chest. “Seems like kind of a strange place to leave a gift.”

“You’re welcome. And that’s sort of the point of a hope chest.”

“A ho… a what?”

Bones taps the edge of the chest with his foot. “It’s an old pioneer tradition. Back in the day, a woman would collect things for her marriage in a chest like this. Linen, clothes, that sort of thing. So I suppose something like this is a little less traditional, but I figured you might appreciate it more than a gingham dress.” His voice roughens as he speaks, and he doesn’t need the light of day to see that Bones is red-faced.

Kirk tries to joke, “Why, Bones, is this an engagement gift?” but the notes fall flat as he comes to an impossible realization. _Oh Christ, what if it is?_ The thought would have been a month ago. Now, the whole world is off tilt, and he can’t be sure of anything.

A moment too late to be convincing, McCoy clears his throat. “Don’t get so full of yourself. You’d need to be the one buying gifts to convince anyone to marry you.” The words don’t have their usual bite, and Kirk finds McCoy’s eyes stubbornly refuse to meet his own.

“We should put it on the mantle,” he decides finally. “I’m not a traditional sort of man. I don’t want to lock away any fine gingham, thank you. I’d rather my nice things were out in the open.”

He goes inside and puts the frame in the parlor, above the fire. It’s still empty, which means Kirk hasn’t made a choice yet, not really. He’s still got time to back out. The argument is almost convincing.

The rest of the whiskey has vanished in his absence, and the bottle sits on the floor, only a swallow or two remaining. Bones is pressed almost to the edge of the bench, rocking slowly on the balls of his feet. He looks towards the sound of the screen door, but glances just as quickly away, back into the night.

Another choice. He could claim tiredness, run back to his room, pretend the implications of the gift and the meaning of McCoy’s blush are opaque. It doesn’t have to go any further. If they never talk about it, it’ll be like it never happened, one more thing dissolved between the floorboards. After all, he’s lived this long with the thought pushed into the recesses of his mind. What’s another night? Another lifetime?

“Look,” says McCoy. “Fireflies.”

And so there are. Dozens of blinking lights flickering amongst the trees, the only illumination save their candles. As he watches more emerge, until not a moment passes without another glimmer. He’s never seen this many in one place before, and he wills his mind to burn the image forever of Bones, head in his hand, watching fireflies dance in the blackness.

He still doesn’t know how to make the choice that matters, in the end. But the second one, he can make, because he knows what he wants right here, right now. He wants to live in this moment for as long as he can.

Kirk sits by Bones’ side. There’s no more than a handspan between them now, a mockery of distance, and when he reaches down to grab the whiskey bottle his arm brushes the outside of Bones’ knee. They both still.

The last swig goes down like fire, the feeling heady and rich in his chest. Liquid courage. It’s been a long while since he’s needed it like this.

“I didn’t say thank you.” The empty bottle goes back on the floor. When Kirk looks up, McCoy has turned back towards him, his face close enough that Kirk can make out the tiny freckles on his forehead, a symptom of their time outdoors. For lack of a better place to put his nervous hands, he settles them in his lap. “ _Thank you_ , for the gift. And… for everything. These last seven years. For always sticking with me, even when I was being an ass.”

He pauses, waiting for a response that doesn’t come. “I just wanted to say, regardless of what happens from now, wherever our lives take us… I’m glad to be here. With you.”

“I’ve never felt anything like when I’m with you,” Bones whispers. “I never thought I could.” The flush rises faster than he can control it and suddenly his hands are on Bones’ shoulders, needing to feel closer, to feel everything.

He can’t say for certain who closes the gap, but after an age, it’s Bones who pulls away, spit-shined lips and messy hair more intoxicating than the alcohol in his veins and he leans forward, desperate for more of this, afraid to let the evening end and the morning come, reminding him of all the reasons he won’t get away with being so reckless – he never gets away with it – but Bones’ hand on his chest keeps him at bay.

“I think we should go to bed,” he breathes, and stands, leaving Kirk’s hands clutched around empty space.

It’s a dismissal, and though he knows he’s not owed anything it still cuts into Kirk like a whip, punching the air right from his lungs. He thinks about all the girls, and holding his clothes outside closed doors.

Of course. This is, ultimately, what was inevitable. Once it’s about sex, intimacy is out of the equation. He knows this, should have known this. Should have remembered better.

“Right,” he manages to croak. “Right. I’ll just… I’ll come in in a bit.”

McCoy looks at him strangely, but he pastes on as genuine a fake smile as he can manage. And after a moment, he finds himself on an empty porch.

He knew it was a risk. A stupid, stupid risk.

The fireflies are still blinking away.

When he’s sure he can say _Goodnight_ without his voice shaking, he goes in and climbs the stairs, feet heavier with every groaning step.

He won’t even bother to brush his teeth. He’s just going to walk down that hall to that empty bedroom, and if he’s lucky, everything will be forgotten in the morning. If he’s unlucky, he’s just ruined the best friendship he’s had in his life. He won’t know until the sun rises. For once, he doubts the fresh air will be enough to buy him a good night’s sleep.

The lights are on at the top of the stairwell. Kirk pauses on the threshold, suddenly missing the cover of darkness, and wishing he’d stayed out just a little longer. He can’t do an awkward conversation, not now.

“Jim.” He looks to his right, and there stands McCoy, clad in sleep clothes, his hair still mussed, and Kirk _wants_. He keeps his firsts clenched at his sides. “I don’t mean to… to _impose_ , but if you wanted to… I mean, my bed’s big enough…” Kirk’s thoughts freeze in their downward spiral. “We could share. Like old times, but I promise I won’t make you sleep on a ratty couch.”

He can’t speak. He’s certain he’s doing a fair impression of a dumb fish. “Don’t let me pressure you, though,” Bones mumbles, his hand rubbing at the back of his neck. This time, Kirk can see the flush.

“Yeah, Bones,” he says. He can hardly believe it. “I’d like that. Like old times.”

And it is like old times, in all the ways that matter. They don’t do much but kiss once or twice. They’re both so exhausted that sleep is on the cusp of every movement, and when Kirk passes out, it’s in the same comfort he felt in Bones’ – _their_ – room at the Academy. That when he wakes up, there’ll be someone waiting there with a smile, happy that he spent the night, glad of his presence.

It feels a little bit like coming home.


	23. Act 3 - Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I'm back in my hometown for the holidays, but I remembered to email myself the document, thankfully! Updates should continue as regularly scheduled (or maybe even a little more frequently, since I have a bit of downtime!) but I probably won't get a chance to reply to many comments since my tablet isn't terribly conducive to it. Know that I read and appreciate every single thing that you readers post! I feel incredibly humbled by the response, it's wonderful to hear everyones's reactions - I never expected to hear from so many people!
> 
> Hope everyone who celebrates has a wonderful Christmas and time to reflect on what really, truly makes them happy. God knows I wish we all got three month leaves to reevaluate our lives ;)

The turnip in his hand resembles nothing so much as an angry old man, cursing the grey sky above. Kirk glares right back before tossing it into the crate of other ugly men. 

Just one more row, and he can give his back a break. 

At the other end of the garden, Bones is wrist-deep in the soil, trying to wrestle out a mound of stubborn carrots that seem to have grown attached in their slumber. He wrestles with the whole clump and with one final heave, they pop from the ground, sending McCoy tumbling onto his backside in the dirt. 

“You alright over there?” he calls out, not really concerned. Bones raises the bunch above his head as a banner of triumph. They’ve both taken their fair share of spills today – maybe Monday mist and dreary weather isn’t the best time for harvesting. His clothes are heavy with caked mud and moisture, and he’s sure at least a couple worms have taken up residence in the cuffs of his pants, escaping from the carnage the two of them have spent the last six hours wreaking on their earthen home. 

In the end, it was only two months and a week that he’d needed to see the garden blossom. The potatoes will need another week or so, but the rest of the crops are ready, right on the money for Bones’ prediction. The pea plants climb past the kitchen window now, thriving under careful pruning and daily attention. They’ll leave those for last. The shoots are hardy and aren’t likely to overripen in the next few days. 

Twelve crates worth of vegetables lie in the tattered remains of what were once neatly hewn rows. More than enough to last a single man a winter, just barely enough for two while supplementing from other sources. 

It’ll be enough, one way or the other.

They meet in the centre of the row, hands poised over the same spot: the last unturned square of soil.

“Want to do the honours?” Kirk says. He sits back on his haunches, giving McCoy the space to do the final pull, but McCoy offers his trowel instead.

“Should be you, I think. In honour of you becoming such a fine gardener. I didn’t think there was hope for you at first, but here we are.”

“Here we are.” The last stroke is easy, the turnip less stubborn than the rest, and when they stand and survey their work, it’s with the sort of accomplishment Kirk felt receiving his first commendation.

“I think it’s going to rain again,” Bones says, glancing up at the darkened sky. “We should get the lot inside the shed. I’d hate to see anything rot after all that suffering.”

A thought occurs to Kirk. “Why not the root cellar?” 

Bones regards him with a look Kirk can only interpret as puzzlement. “What do you mean?”

“Back here,” he says, and when Bones makes no move to follow he grabs him by the elbow and leads him around the house. Though they’ve had more contact than this in the weeks since they first kissed, the touch still feels significant for the ease by which he can just  _ do  _ it. The swoop in his stomach hasn’t diminished either. If anything, it’s gotten stronger with every passing day. Excitement, anticipation, and dread feel much the same, and as the end of his leave grows nearer, they muddle into an emotion he no longer recognizes. It’s not strictly unpleasant, but it’s impossible to ignore.

The grass has grown even wilder since the time he first discovered the hatch, and it takes some scuffing of his toe against empty space before it lands on the raised edge of the cover. When he pulls away the grass, the spot looks the same as it had in their first month, with the same rusted lock.

“Hmm.” Bones bends down and fingers the lock, considering. “I’d forgotten about this.”

“This seems like exactly the sort of place a young boy would have wanted to explore. Good place to hide from a sister?”

Bones chuckles. “Maybe.”

“I haven’t seen a lock like this outside of a history museum. It needs a mechanical key. Any idea where that might be?”

“Sorry, no idea.”

“Your grandma didn’t have a ring lying around somewhere? It’s not hundreds of years old – see the scratches on the bottom? It’s definitely been opened in the last century, though that’s as far as my archaeological expertise goes.”

“If she did, she never told me about it. You’ve got to remember, Jim, I was only fifteen when she died.”

“Yes, but-”

“Jim.” Bones’ voice is hard. “I don’t know, alright?”

A rumble sounds – distant thunder. Kirk startles as a cold droplet lands on his cheek. “We better get those vegetables inside, huh?”

They make quick work of the transport to the shed, much quicker than they did of the actual harvest, and the actual rain begins in earnest only after they’ve shut the screen door.

“Maybe we should have stayed out there,” Kirk jokes. “Could’ve saved having to take a shower.”

They’re filthy, the two of them. Even through the rose-coloured glasses of affection, McCoy looks and smells like a godawful mess, and he doubts he’s much better. One of them will have to scrub the tub down after they’re done with it, that’s for sure. 

After he’s mercifully clean and laundered, he wanders downstairs to find Bones watching the rain out of the kitchen window. His dark hair is still damp from his own shower, curling slightly at the ends as it dries against his neck. He finds himself fixated on those curls, and before he can overthink it, he walks up and slips his hands around Bones’ waist.

Bones sighs and leans his head back, melting into Kirk’s frame. He can smell his shampoo, something light and simple, and Kirk closes his eyes, just breathing in and out, rocking gently from foot to foot.

“You know what the rain means?” Bones murmurs.

“No, what?”

“Tomorrow will be clearer than you can believe. It always is, the day after rain here. You can almost taste the sunshine.” Kirk hums, utterly relaxed under the influence of drowsiness and hot water and a comfortable weight at his front. “I missed that, more than you could believe. People aren’t meant to live without the changing of seasons, or the sunshine after a storm. Can’t get that on a ship.”

It’s a pointed prod at a conversation Kirk has been putting off, but he’s far too comfortable to engage in it now.

“Can I take you someplace tomorrow?”

Kirk hums again, nuzzling deeper into Bones’ neck. The curls tickle his nose.

“There’s a place I love, down past the water. Let’s have a picnic.”

“Sounds good.”

“Good.” 

The rain beats down and Kirk lets himself drift. The PADD on the table flashes twice red, then goes dark. He ignores it, and lets the catalogue of unread messages grow.


	24. Act 3 - Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This scene was basically the reason I wrote the fic. Knowing I HAD to get to it was my major motivation for actually finishing the fic. Many thanks to my friend who drew a beautiful illustration of Bones and Kirk in a field which inspired the scene, and thus everything else you've read thus far :)

The morning dawns as bright and clear as Bones promised. They spend a lazy morning in bed, dozing and making jokes. Bones finally forces them out of bed, promising Kirk if he doesn’t get out he’ll shove him out. They’ve got a long walk ahead of them. Still, neither feels particularly industrious, and it’s well towards noon before coffee is made, blankets found, cutlery and hamper packed. 

The basket is full to overflowing when they’re done with it – thick ham sandwiches on day-old rye bread, raspberry preserves and scones, warm potato salad, fresh snap peas and radishes in vinegar, thermoses of sweet tea and sugar cookies. It’s more than they could possibly eat in an afternoon, but they keep piling it on anyways, and cover the whole lot with a checkered towel when they’ve finished.

Kirk doesn’t even bother to check his PADD before they head out. He’d rather not spoil the event with any of the inevitable anxiety that comes with the creeping date and the increasingly frantic communiques from Starfleet. He can’t give them an answer he doesn’t know himself.

They leave the hottest part of the day behind them under shaded trees, now more familiar and less foreboding in their twists and turns along the path. The creek lies around the bend, but they follow a different fork, pressing forward parallel to the water, until they find a place where the channel narrows and they can cross without soaking their shoes. 

As they climb the bank of the opposite ravine, the light breaks through the line of trees on the crest. The wave of warmth at the top is glorious, and he finds himself running ahead, leaving McCoy to struggle with the heavy basket. 

He steps out from the floor of sodden leaves onto clean green grass, transformed by the afternoon sun into an emerald hue that sweeps out over a full acre of open space. Near the end of the field, a waving mirage of stalks grow taller and yellower, reaching up toward the edge of the forest that surrounds the clearing. Past the grass the trees grow taller, darker, though from this distance their shape is barely more than a dark swatch against the sky.

“It’s something, isn’t it?”

Feeling guilty, he takes the basket from McCoy’s willing hands. “You weren’t lying, Bones.”

Bones huffs a laugh. “Now, when have I ever lied to you?”

They cross the clearing to find a comfortable spot to lay down their burdens. As they approach, the forest becomes more than a blob of colour, and Kirk can make out the conical tops of the trees: rows upon rows of pine trees that stretch out to the edge of the clearing. At the far end of the pines lies the edge of what might be an orchard, judging by the even placement of the trees, though they’re still too far to guess if any summer fruit hangs from the branches.

It turns out that the long grasses, tamped down with boots and overlaid with a blanket, make a comfortable approximation of a mattress – springy and soft, if a little prickly. 

Food has never in his life tasted so good. Stone-ground mustard and salty ham, soft bread and sweet tea meld together on his tongue, and though Kirk tries to show self-control, he ends with a heavy stomach and heavier head, and it’s all he can do to keep from falling asleep as he flops back onto the blanket, thoroughly satisfied. 

“C’mere.” Kirk shuffles willingly to the side until Bones can slide his arm underneath his shoulders. The grass is springy enough to provide a sort of cushion that they can lean against, cradled against the bed of stalks. 

With midday long past and feet still damp from their trek, the warmth of another body is welcome, and Kirk lets himself be indulgent and scoot in closer, until their bodies join from shoulder to ankle, and Bones throws the edge of the blanket over their legs with his free hand. 

The wind is still, barely more than a whisper, and it licks through the grass, each gentle gust sending shimmering waves across the expanse of green. 

“I still can’t believe this is where you grew up. How did you ever leave?”

“All I can say is, it’s good to be back.”

“Mm.” Kirk shifts closer, leaning his head into Bones’ neck and letting his eyes drift closed. 

“Jim?” Bones asks softly.

“Mm?” he responds, not opening his eyes.

“Have you ever thought about getting married?”

Kirk pauses. He hopes Bones can’t feel his heartbeat rocket through his chest.  There’s just enough of a sliver of ambiguity to misinterpret the question, so he chooses his words carefully.

“Not much,” he admits. “It always seemed like a faraway thing.” He waits with bated breath.

“I always wanted it to be here.”

Bones takes his hand and squeezes, and Kirk opens his eye, watches the way their fingers play together. 

“Can’t you see it?” Bones lets go of his hand, and his fingers miss the touch immediately. “White pavilion right there, tall as a poplar, big enough to hold a hundred chairs.” He gestures towards the center of the field, and Kirk  _ can  _ see it, the white canvas fits perfectly in his mind’s eye. “Nothing fancy, just a few poles pushed into the ground, and a white-painted arch from the local carpenter. Family and friends, and maybe a few neighbours.”

Kirk’s mind supplies the rest of the guest list. He sees Uhura, radiant in a yellow dress; Sulu linking arms with his husband; his mother, finally leaving her house… Even Spock, so out of place in the heat, but smiling and placing his hand on Kirk’s shoulder, a word of solemn congratulation that turns up at the end into genuine affection. The guests spread around the imaginary tent, then take their places on the spindly chairs. 

“The flower girl gathers her marigolds down by the creek and comes back with mud on her dress.” Sulu’s daughter, just five, with ribbons in her hair. “A string quartet, playing-”

“Anything but Pachelbel’s Canon,” Kirk cuts in, and Bones laughs. 

“Sure. How about Here Comes the Bride?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Something cheerful and light then.”

“Nothing too solemn,” Kirk agrees. 

“Got it. I’m adjusting my suit when the music starts, a total nervous wreck, waiting for my cue to walk in.”

“What colour?”

“Hmm?”

“What colour suit?” If he’s going to paint this picture in his mind, he wants it to be detailed.

“Grey. Charcoal grey,” Bones says confidently.

“Oh? I would have put you in more a cornflower blue myself,” and Bones reaches over and punches his shoulder lightly.

“Aren’t I allowed one outfit that doesn’t remind me of my uniform?”

“Fine, fine. You’re wearing a charcoal grey suit.” The imaginary Bones fiddles with his cufflinks, shifting from foot to foot as he waits at the entrance to the tent impatiently.

“Thank you. Now, the cheerful-but-not-solemn music starts playing, and I make my way down the aisle.”

The closest wall of the tent becomes transparent as McCoy takes his place under the white arch, his back to the open field. 

“Are you nervous?”

“Of course. Wouldn’t you be, on your wedding day?” Kirk doesn’t answer, and McCoy gives his shoulder a little squeeze. “I can see everyone in the front row smiling, but I think I might throw up.”

“On your charcoal shoes?”

“Shush, you. My shoes are white, if you must know.”

“Hm. Very stylish.”

The groomsmen stand at Bones’ side, with matching white loafers. Scotty, dapper and slick for once in his life. Chekov, somehow both too tall and too thin for his suit, bouncing on his heels. “And I’m waiting, and I’m waiting, and getting ready to murder whoever chose the music for making the interlude so long-” Kirk laughs. “-and then… the most beautiful creature in the whole universe walks down the aisle toward me.”

Kirk flushes to the tips of his toes, and he has the crazy urge to bury his face in Bones’ arm. Bones is grinning, and Kirk gives up trying to hide his embarrassment, letting the cheesy grin spread to his face.

He’s there now, feels the swoop of joy in his chest as he sees the makeshift room packed with all his friends, and at the end stands someone who loves him unconditionally, returning his smile from across the distance.

After a moment of guilt – is it possible to be presumptuous towards a memory? – Pike materializes at his side and takes his arm as they walk down the aisle. If it’s to be a perfect day, he can imagine what he wants, and he wants Pike there.

He reaches the end. No dais, no altar, just plain earth and the white arch rising above them. He wishes himself barefoot, and as he reaches his real hand to brush the ground, the cool grass rises between his imaginary toes.

He looks into the imaginary Bones’ eyes and opens his mouth and-

The vision fades there as he loses grasp of the fantasy, pushed from the inside. It bends and cracks under the weight of reality, and this time he really does bury his face into Bones’ side.

“It sounds perfect,” he mumbles into the fabric.

“Yeah,” Bones whispers. “Perfect.” He hesitates a moment, then pulls Kirk up till they’re facing each other. His eyes are utterly serious. “We could have it, you know.”

Kirk swallows. There it is – the confirmation, the inevitable truth, and he wants to brush it off with a joke, put it off one more day, but he can’t. “You think so?”

“You know how much I love you,” Bones breathes, and the lump in Kirk’s throat tightens. “You have to make a choice, Jim. For my sake, and for yours.”

The future is laid out before him, in the gathering dusk and the stars above, and the man by his side and the open expanse of the field.

“I want this,” he says, tasting the words on his tongue and measuring them true. “I want  _ this. _ ” Bones’ eyes shine with a rising hope, and he leans closer, till they share the same breath. 

“Yeah?”

“I want this.”

“Then stay with me.”

“Yes.”

“You mean it?”

“Yes.”

And he does, and he kisses Bones with every ounce of surety he has. 


	25. Act 3 - Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The beginning of the end.

The road to town feels as familiar as any of the Enterprise’s corridors now. Kirk knows every divot, every ditch, where to pause for a rest, where to spot wild raspberries and when to sidestep to avoid scratched legs. He walks the path like he’s known it his whole life.

As he walks, he searches for the words he couldn’t find the night before. The first draft of his official request for extended leave lies unsent on the PADD on the kitchen table. It will be denied, and so the first draft of a request for discharge from service is open beside it. It should have been the hardest thing he’s ever written. It’s not. That honour is reserved for the third file, this one a personal message. It’s still mostly blank.

Spock will understand why he’s leaving. Forget his Vulcan stoicism, Kirk knows he knows what it is to love, and to fear losing that love. That doesn’t make the writing any easier.

He’s so lost in thought as he walks, drafting that final letter and erasing line after line as he tries and fails to phrase his explanation into something that doesn’t sound unbearably selfish, that he barely notices the approaching footsteps until they’re almost upon him. When he looks up, his mouth falls open.

It’s the woman, the ghost. She has a canvas tucked under her arm, dressed in sensible khakis and a loose blouse, and Kirk can’t help but realize that she’s beautiful, made more beautiful by the happy surprise of having found her again.

“Well, hello!” he says, grinning eagerly. “Jim, we met a couple months back?”

She looks past him, back the direction he’s come, studiously avoiding Kirk’s eyes. She has the air of a deer about to bolt, which takes Kirk aback. Clearly, he’s the only one who was been eager for a reunion.

“I would have thought you’d be gone by now.” There’s nothing accusatory in her words, but she doesn’t sound happy to see him either.

“Looks like I may be sticking around for the long haul,” he replies cautiously.

She considers his words for a long moment. “Is that so?”

“I hoped that maybe we could chat? I’d love to hear more about the area from someone who knows it, especially if I’m going to be here for a while. Only if you have time, of course,” he corrects.

“Maybe… that would be good. For both of us.”

“Great!” he says, trying to reign his own enthusiasm in to match the cautious agreement of the woman.

She pushes back a few strands of grey hair where they’ve escaped from her braid, and Kirk can’t be sure, but she seems _older_ than the last time he saw her. Tired in a way he recognizes, a way he thought he’d left behind. “If you’re free this evening, come by my place. It occurs to me that I have a painting I owe you.”

“No, you really don’t h-”

“I finished it barely a week after we met, but I’ve been debating… it doesn’t matter. You should have it.” She glances again back past Kirk. “Do you know the creek, past the McCoy homestead?

“Very well.”

Her mouth tightens even further, but she continues. “If you cross it, you’ll come to a clearing, and a row of pines at the end of that.” He nods. “About ten minutes through the trees is my house. You shouldn’t miss is, the path is clear to follow.”

He can’t believe it. All this time of wondering, and they were that close all along? “Great, I’ll see you tonight then. Looking forward to it.”

She doesn’t return the sentiment, but a sad smile creeps onto her face nonetheless. “Till then, Jim.” And she’s gone down the road, back towards the house and the creek and the field.

He makes the rest of the grocery trip in record time, excitement and nerves warring in his stomach, and it’s barely mid-afternoon by the time he makes it back to the house.

“Bones!” he shouts, stumbling through the front door in his hurry. “You’ll never guess who I just met!”

“The devil, I’m guessing, judging by your shortage of breath,” Bones says dryly from the kitchen, where he’s husking corn into the sink.

Kirk tosses the bag of groceries onto the floor and darts to Bones’ side, boosting himself up onto the counter so that his legs can swing like he’s eight again. “The _ghost_.”

Bones stops husking. “Really.” His reaction to the revelation is lackluster, to say the least. It’s not going to ruin Kirk’s good mood. “She invited me to come visit tonight, but I’m sure you’re welcome too. What do you say, up for an evening stroll past the creek?”

Bones tosses the finished corn into a bowl and brings it to the kitchen table. When he straightens up his shoulders are tense, and Kirk’s smile fades. “No, I think I’d rather stay in, if it’s all the same to you. Besides,” he says, “I’ve already got dinner all ready to go. Why not go another night?”

“Well, I mean, she invited me _tonight_ ,” he says slowly. Bones grabs a tureen of potatoes and starts peeling. The skin comes off in jagged clumps. Usually Bones’ hands have a surgeon’s technique, even when it comes to vegetables. “You don’t have to join me if you don’t want, but I’m going.”

Bones puts the knife down and stares at the far wall. “I’d rather you didn’t, if it’s all the same.”

Kirk frowns. This is… not the reaction he was expecting. “Why the fuss? Not like she’s a witch that’s going to eat me up.” Bones doesn’t respond, just huffs and picks up the knife again and gets back to peeling.  “Fine, you stay here and get the grumpy old man out of your system.”

He’s annoyed, sure. He’s excited and he wants Bones to share that excitement, and to get such a lukewarm reaction takes the wind from his sails. But they’ve had their share of little spats before. Hell, since they’ve come to Georgia, they’ve actually been almost unusually amiable. A little tension should feel like getting back to normal.

Kirk finishes unpacking the groceries in silence. “Alright, I’m off. Save a plate for me,” he says, and kisses McCoy lightly on the cheek. It’s like kissing a stone, petrified in time.

As he takes his first steps down the path into the forest, the wind begins to rise.


	26. Act 3 - Chapter 6

The clearing is transformed under the late afternoon light. The reddish sky melts down into the grass, bathing it in an ombre hue of dusky gold, and whatever green remains no longer shimmers in the breeze. Its tone is muted down, only beginning to catch the edge of the gathering evening, and though it would only take a touch of sunlight to bring the field back to life, Kirk can’t help but shiver at the alien landscape. It’s beautiful, but cold.

The woman hadn’t lied; the path draws up from all directions once he passes the threshold of pine trees, merging from a broad swatch of narrow trails into one wide way. A pavane of stately firs guards the path, guiding his steps, and he follows eagerly.

When he comes upon the woman’s house, it feels almost on accident. Compared to Bones’ grandiose antebellum farmhouse, the simple cabin is almost quaint. A single story of rough-hewn logs, braced by slim shim-steel supports, unadorned by paint or decorations save the flag embedded in the ground by the entranceway. The thick cluster of trees block the back edge from his sight, and he has no way to estimate how far the walls go back without circling the cabin.

There’s no keypad or charm by the door, so he opts for a light knock, and breathes a sigh of relief when a familiar face opens it to him. With a quiet welcome, she invites him in, and his eyes go wide as he steps through the foyer.

Every inch of the walls is covered in artwork. Paintings, carvings, cross-stich, embroidery. He follows her into a sitting room to the right, and there he finds cozy loveseats and wicker chairs, all glazed in the red glow of a roaring fire. She gestures to a couch in the corner and he sits, sinking deep into the cushions.

She leaves him alone in the room a moment and returns with tea in a simple kettle. When she pours the water, the cup doesn’t steam, and when he picks up the cup, the porcelain barely warms his hands. Still, he sips politely, savouring the cool taste of spearmint.

His eyes light on a mechanical contraption in the corner. It’s an enormous loom, with chords like baleen, thin and empty. The shuttle lies discarded to the side, and its spool is twined with aquamarine thread that dulls under a thick layer of dust.

“You’ve got a lovely house,” he says after the silence grows too awkward.  She watches him, unspeaking, and he swallows. Those eyes bore through him, as though searching his face for a sign of… something. “Did you paint all of these yourself?” He gestures to the wall hangings.

“Most,” she answers finally. “A few were my daughter’s work.” She points to one in particular – a childish rendering of a giraffe. Its elongated neck is feathered at the edges, the mark of an unsure hand.

“She takes after you, I take it?” he says.

She regards him with confusion, like his words are pieces ill-suited to a puzzle only she can see. “I always thought so. Her passion was always weaving though, which I never had much of a skill for.”

He sips again from the tea, letting the silence grow. Then she says, with a tone so quiet he almost misses it, “I wanted you to be different.”

“Excuse me?” he asks, and she sighs, and the sound mingles with the creaking of the walls as a swell of wind buffets about the outside.

“You’re not what I expected. You should take that as a compliment.”

“You were expecting me? Tonight, you mean?”

“I suppose… for a long time.” Kirk feels suddenly self-conscious, and he begins to think for the first time that Bones might be right about the ghost thing. What does that mean, she’d been _waiting_ for him?

Before he can inquire further, she reaches down and pulls a small canvas from beneath the coffee table. “This is what I promised you.” She hesitates a moment, cradling the painting in her wizened hands. “Do you still want it, even now that you know?”

She looks at him, and he looks back, unable to provide the depth of expression she’s looking for. It’s like they’re describing two halves of a coin, neither able to see the other’s side. There’s something here that’s missing between them, a common thread he’s misplaced.

“Of course. If you still want to give it to me.”

She passes him the painting.

It’s a ship in a bottle, just as he’d requested, but his imagination hadn’t done the topic justice. The ship itself is a schooner, with cream foresails and broad mainsail pulled taut, undisturbed by any wind. Its bow keens toward the top left corner, like it’s cresting an invisible wave. Fine lines of brushwork form the rigging and little darts adorn the wooden sides with cracks of subtle wear. The top of the main mast nearly taps the edge of the bottle, whose edges are rimmed in blue light from an unseen source.

It’s beautiful, and he looks up to tell the woman so, but she nudges his right hand upward and he obliges, closing his mouth. His eyes widen.

As the light shifts, so do the colours of the painting. The bright blue rim of the bottle shimmers and fades into an effervescent navy hue, black background somehow even deeper, and the sails... What once was cream and brown ripples and shifts to reveal a background of deep blue and a constellation of bright stars, twinkling in and out of existence as he rocks the canvas from side to side, like triangular portals into the unknown sky beyond.

When he brings the canvas back to a flat position, the shape of the schooner returns, and it’s still a beautiful painting, but seems gloomier somehow for knowing what’s under the surface.

“That’s amazing,” he says, and his wonder is genuine. He’s got no idea how someone would even create that effect. It’s as mysterious as any stellar phenomena he’s encountered. He holds the canvas out to her. “I really can’t accept this. It’s too much.”

She pushes the painting back into his hands. “Listen to my advice.” She takes a breath, steeling herself. “It’s something my mother used to say to me, when she taught me to paint as a girl. ‘A home’s happiness can be measured in what hangs on the walls.’” She taps the canvas with a finger. Her next words are softer still.

“You can pay me by making your home a happy one.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he breathes, and he doesn’t, but he _does_ , and how does _she_ know?

He looks again at the painting, and this time he notices the letters in the corner. A signature in neat white script.

_Emma Blackfield_

It takes a moment for his mind to gather the pieces, and then he sees the bottles, label burnt into his memory after so many nights of drinking. _Blackfield Cordial. Emma Blackfield. Blackfield. Blackfield._

“That house wasn’t meant to sit empty and alone so long.”

Emma sits back in her chair, the intensity gone from her eyes, and she looks every inch of her age, wrinkles setting and creases deepening as she sinks back.

_Blackfield._

“You said, when we met, that you’d lived here for 40 years,” he starts, trying to slow his racing heart. “Did you know the woman who lived in the house before. Her name would have been McCoy.” Emma just stares at him, dumbfounded and unresponsive, and so he presses on. “Was it you who gave her all those cases of Blackfield Cordial?”

She nearly drops her tea cup, and Kirk is glad of the low temperature as he rescues the porcelain from her shaking hands and liquid sloshes over his fingertips.

“What did Leonard tell you about me?” she asks, suddenly desperate, and Kirk’s heart races even faster.

“Nothing,” he tries to reassure her, “I don’t think he even knows you-” but he stops as she gasps. Far from reassured, she looks stricken.

“Then he didn’t tell you about Blackfield-”

“Your name?”

“ _Here_ ,” she says urgently. “Blackfield, beyond the line of trees? It was named for my family. He didn’t tell you…”

“I think I’ve missed something-”

“And what of the house? Did he tell you about the house? Why it’s empty?”

“What? I don’t understand-”

“Jesus,” she mutters, burying her face in her hands. “Jesus.”

“You have to tell me what’s going on.”

In her eyes, just for a fraction of a moment, he sees a sliver of the hate of the shopkeeper in her eyes. “I don’t need to tell you a thing. I’m not the one who’s been keeping secrets from you.”

“What do-”

“Go home, Jim, and ask Leonard to tell you about Blackfield. About _everything._ ”

“I don’t-”

“ _Go_ ,” she says, pushing him towards the door. “I didn’t want to believe it,” she mutters. “I _can’t_ believe it… Alan was right…”

Outside, the wind beats with a steady whack against the trees, humid air swirling all through the gathering dusk.

“Can I come to see you again?”

“I’m not sure you’ll want to,” she says, and closes the door in his face.

He’s left with nothing but a locked door before him, and at his back, the bluster of a rising storm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And with that, some of the lovely reader theories are either debunked or confirmed - but what else is left to be revealed? Stay tuned! The next chapter is the longest in the story by a country mile.


	27. Act 3 - Chapter 7

The sky above the field casts a blue-green glow over the open field, but Kirk pays it no mind as he speeds through the grass, thoughts racing as fast as his legs.

Blackfield, the woman, empty walls, a loom collecting dust in a corner. The pieces sift through his mind, draining like sand into an hourglass, unshaped. Why had Bones claimed not to know Emma? How could she know him by name, and him not know her at all? One of them has to be lying, but her words ring truer than his evasions.

The trees do little to shelter him from the wind, and when he reaches the creek he has to hold onto the whipping branches to navigate down the slope to the water. Above his head, the tattered remains of the rope twist around a branch like a colony of snakes. He leaps across, but the water is higher than it was before and he ends up with his feet in the mud.

The sky is dark, too dark, and he hears the rumble of thunder before the first drop of rain hits his shoulder. Branches reach out across the path, grasping at his sleeves and pulling him into the blackness but he shrugs them off, enduring the scrapes with a single-minded determination. In the distance, he swears he hears the roar of an engine, but the sound is too constant and too broad, coming at him from all directions at once. It triggers a memory he’d forgotten since childhood, of a terrible storm, and his stepfather shouting-

_Shit. Shit shit shit_

The end of the path grows nearer, the shape of the bench emerging behind the trees. The iron shines like burnished copper, green and sickly in the unnatural light filtering into the clearing. He breaks through the trees and panting, turns his face to the sky with growing horror.

In the open air, the sound of wind is deafening, beating at his ears, and though he knows what he’s looking for, his mouth still falls open when he finds it.

A black mass like a cloud of swirling locusts blots the horizon. He can’t see the base of the funnel through the trees but he feels the rush of power that lies beneath. It rolls through his chest in the rumble of thunder, which itself is barely a murmur beneath the ever-present roar of the wind.

“Bones!” he shouts, racing towards the door. “Bones, it’s a goddamn tornado!”

The garden is littered with white specks that when he draws closer he recognizes as hail. Some pieces are as big as a walnut. There’s no way Bones wouldn’t have heard the racket of all that falling.

“Bones!” The door swings open, but the wind catches it and yanks it out of Bones’ hand. Kirk jumps back and the door whistles past his nose.

Bones takes one look at the sky and the colour drains from his face. “Shit. C’mon, let’s get inside-”

“Are you crazy? We have to get underground!” He grabs McCoy’s elbow and drags him out into the rain. “If you know where that root cellar key is, now is a _really_ good time to tell me!”

If it’s possible, McCoy’s face gets even paler. He freezes mid-stride.

“Bones, _move it!_ ”

“Jim, we should get inside.” Kirk lets go of his arm and runs to the woodblock where the axe is still lodged. He grabs it and yanks until it comes free. “What the hell are you doing, man?”

“We don’t have time to argue!” he shouts back. Fresh pieces of hail bounce off his shoulders and he lifts one hand to block his face as he tears around the side of the house. He can barely hear McCoy’s frantic footsteps behind him over the din of the storm.

At least the wind is flattening the grass around the walls down, making the root cellar’s hatch an easy target to spot. He’s only a foot or two away before McCoy catches him and yanks at his jacket with enough force that he stumbles into the wall, nearly falling against the axe.

He whirls, gasping as adrenaline rushes beneath his skin. Too close…

McCoy’s face is as dark as the clouds above, his eyes grey and unrecognizable. “Jim,” he says in a voice too measured and calm for the doom approaching, “You need to give me the axe, and get inside.”

Kirk tightens his grip on the axe as he holds his other hand out, soothing the man possessed in front of his eyes. “Bones-”

McCoy lunges and he has no choice but to toss the axe away as he drops. McCoy’s shoulder hits the wall with a crack and he howls, but the stun only lasts a moment before he turns and starts advancing again. Kirk doesn’t have time to think, to contemplate, only to _move_. He zeros in on where the axe landed the moment that McCoy does the same, but he’s got the advantage of age and his hand closes on the handle moments before McCoy’s. A quick knee to the ribs sends McCoy staggering back and that’s all Kirk needs to make a break for the hatch.

He heaves with all his might, and to his relief a single solid swing shatters the old lock. He falls to his knees and pulls the pieces away, but he doesn’t get enough time to lift the heavy lid before a ramming weight knocks him into the grass. Above him, McCoy snarls, more rabid dog than man, and Kirk jerks his head to the side to avoid the punch that would have shattered his nose.

Only one choice now: fight.

Using every instinct he’s picked up from a lifetime of brawling Kirk lashes out with his foot, ready to bite his way to freedom if need be. The blow connects and McCoy rolls off him, wheezing and clutching at his stomach.

Kirk half crawls, half throws himself at the latch. The rain’s made the handle slippery and it takes a few tries to throw it open, but a pit of darkness has never looked more inviting, and he drags himself in without hesitation. His muddy feet land on a set of wooden steps leading down into the cellar below.

From this vantage, he’s at eye level with McCoy, who’s still sprawled on the ground.

Logically, Kirk knows that inviting a man that just attacked him into a dark space with no escape route is a terrible plan. But if he leaves him out there, there’s no telling what will become of McCoy. If they’re lucky, the tornado will miss the house, but he’s not counting on luck, not where Bones’ life is concerned.

Kirk curses as he hauls himself out of the hole and stumbles towards his attacker.

McCoy is pliant under his fingers when he grasps his arm, but Kirk is taking no chances, and he braces every step as he pulls him along, McCoy murmuring “no, no…”, but offering only a token resistance.

When they reach the mouth of the cellar, McCoy freezes to the spot, but Kirk crowds and shoves until McCoy has no choice but to take a step down, or risk tumbling headfirst down the stairs. Whatever’s overtaken McCoy’s mind clearly has a sense of self-preservation, because he takes the step, and then another, until they’re both far enough in to close the hatch. Kirk grabs the discarded axe before he does, and after the hatch is shut he fumbles blindly for a tense few moments, praying he doesn’t cut off his own hands. He finally manages to wedge the handle into the handgrips, sealing the cellar shut.

He takes a moment to let the primal fear of the unknown darkness pass, willing his heart to slow. With the hatch closed, the roar is dampened and he can hear McCoy breathing below him. He’s not moving.

Light. They need light. That’s the first problem to solve.

He runs his hands over the walls, hoping to feel a switch or a toggle. He even half-heartedly calls out “Computer, lights!” but to no surprise, there’s nothing. His hand brushes the fabric of McCoy’s sleeve and he flinches, but McCoy remains motionless. Even his breathing goes quiet, and that’s almost worse than the darkness.

He finally finds purchase on a shelf just beside McCoy. His fingers close around something cold and plastic – a lantern of some sort? It’s cylindrical, and he presses a raised groove experimentally with his thumb. A thin stream of light sputters out, and for a second Kirk has hope before the stream flickers and dies. He presses the button again – nothing.

“Batteries,” McCoy says hoarsely. “Here.” Unlike Kirk’s scrambling fingers, there’s no sound of a frantic search when he reaches out, only a scrape as he pulls something from the shelf, as though he knew exactly where it was all along. Kirk is too slow to resist when McCoy takes the device from his hand, and after a tense minute, the light flares again. The beam is bright and steady, casting McCoy’s face in a ghostly glow as he hands the light back to Kirk.

The wild look is gone from McCoy’s eyes, replaced with the blank stare of a corpse. A bubble of something dark and viscous forms at the edge of his mouth - blood? Kirk pushes past him. They should get away from the hatch, just in case it blows off. Deeper down, into the unknown. They’ll be safer there, Kirk tells himself, because it’s all he’s got.

The light is wide enough to light their feet as they descend, but Kirk’s stomach still drops when they hit the final step and his next connects with solid earth. The air around them is musty, smelling of old rot and dry soil, and he keeps the light trained downwards, not wanting to accidentally step on an upturned nail or shard of wood. The last thing they need is for one of them to exsanguinate now they’ve finally reached the safety of shelter.

It’s only a few steps before he brushes something metal with his knee, and he lifts the light to examine the object blocking their path. It’s a bassinet. The frame is empty, with no mattress or blankets. Its white paint is chipped, and the sharp bottoms of the legs are nearly bare, exposing the cold iron beneath.

_Creepy_.

He sidesteps the relic and pulls McCoy along with him when he hesitates. Though he can’t McCoy’s hand, he hears the ring of fingernails against the edge of the metal.

The wind rattles the house above them, and with a resounding crash something breaks apart above their heads. Kirk startles, tripping sideways until his hip collides with something heavy and solid. The object rocks and though he catches himself before he topples with it, whatever was laid on top crashes to the ground on the other side. The unmistakable sound of shattering glass echoes around the cellar.

“Careful,” he mutters, both to McCoy and himself, and he shines the light on the ground wherever he’d knocked over had fallen, tracing shards of glass to a broken picture frame. He’d have passed over it, more eager to find the portion of the cellar with the least number of hazardous objects to fall on unwary refugees, but something gives him pause.

A white arch.

He stops, then bends to pick up the photo.

The edges are scratched by the broken frame, but the figure in the centre is unmistakable. McCoy’s eager grin beams from the picture, younger than Kirk’s ever seen it, tinged with nervousness that palpates out of the still image. He’s framed by a wooden archway painted white as snow. His dark grey suit stands out against the brilliant emerald grass beneath feet clad in white loafers, spotless and new. To his right are two men that Kirk doesn’t recognize, and the bottom of the photo is taken up by the backs of more unfamiliar heads, all shaded by a white canvas tarp.

“Bones?” he asks, swinging the light back to point at McCoy, scarcely daring to breathe. McCoy’s eyes are fixed on a spot beyond Kirk’s head, and he follows their gaze with the light.

The corner of a chair creeps into view. Pooled around its feet is a cradle of lace, dirtied by the earthen floor and yellowed with age, the shade of rotting teeth. He brings the light up farther to fall upon a silk bodice, with rows of pearls glimmering like eyes in the darkness. In the lap of the dress sits a tiara inlaid with blue ribbons, woven to match the flowers in the archway.

“I didn’t mean for you to see this.”

Kirk turns slowly, angling the light deliberately low. He keeps his eyes trained on McCoy’s feet, watching for any hint of movement.

“See what, Bones?” he whispers. “What am I seeing?”

McCoy goes on like he didn’t hear Kirk’s words. “Just because it didn’t work the first time, doesn’t mean it couldn’t work now.” The light glints on oil and canvas, and Kirk shifts the beam just a little to the right. Illuminated in the glow are a stack of paintings, inlaid with the same familiar signature.

_Emma Blackfield_

_Emma Blackfield_

_Emma B-_

“They all blamed me,” McCoy murmurs. Kirk takes a step backward, and his foot falls on something softer than dirt. He shifts the light towards his own feet. He’s standing on a bed of woven fabric, the tapestry intricate in rivers of red and orange, running towards the heart of a burning sun. “She’d lived here her whole life. Everyone loved her.”

McCoy’s black boot breaks the circle of light. Kirk takes another step back.

“ _I_ loved her. From the moment I pulled her from the creek, I loved her.” The light falls on a final painting, rougher than the rest, signed in uneven block letters.

_Jocelyn Blackfield_

With a final step, Kirk’s back hits the cellar wall.

“Bones, you’re sick…” he tries, but McCoy cuts him off.

“We’ll try again. Brighten the house, make it a home. You loved the frame, didn’t you? We can get more, and plant another tree in the backyard. Get married. Everything will be perfect again.”

Kirk flicks the light back to McCoy’s face, taking in the sunken eyes, the flash of white teeth in a never-ending Glasgow smile. “This isn’t a home,” he says, gripping the light so hard it might shatter in his hand. “This is a graveyard.”

“You’ll see, Jim. Everything will be right as rain.”

“It won’t. Nothing ever stays the same. _Nothing_.” Kirk swallows. “You left here for a reason, Bones. You wanted a fresh start. Don’t throw that away.”

“A fresh start?” McCoy laughs, and the sound sends shivers down Kirk’s spine. “What do you think we’ve been doing here? We planted a _garden_. The first harvest is almost done. All we need to do is plant the second, and we can be happy here forever. It’ll be just the two of us: no worries, no regulations, nothing but blue skies.”

Two dark trails begin to ooze from the corners of McCoy’s mouth, black sludge bubbling between his teeth, and Kirk’s stomach turns as the bile drips from his chin and disappears into the blackness at their feet. McCoy begins to retch, and Kirk is powerless to do anything but watch as he convulses once, twice, then spits something dark and slimy into his palm and holds it to the light.

It’s a seed, dripping with black ooze but already flowering before their eyes. Tendrils break forth from the cracks in the shell and curl between McCoy’s fingers, entwining lovingly until there’s more plant than skin.

“Earth is more beautiful than Omicron Ceti Three ever was. Who knows that better than the two of us? Those colonists were chasing the illusion of something they’ve never known. It’s no wonder they tried and failed, with their cheap imitation of paradise. But me? I know what heaven tastes like. I’ve lived it, and breathed it – it’s as much a part of me now as it ever was.”

The thin beam from the flashlight is momentarily a boon as Kirk searches the darkness to his right with his free hand, hidden from sight. He finds nothing but a flat table, and he can only extend his reach so far without tipping off McCoy to his searching. He nudges the space to his left with his foot. Nothing but empty space and more woven tapestries. He hooks a toe under the corner of the nearest piece of fabric, and waits.

“Snap out of it,” he pleads. “I know you can-”

“Haven’t you been listening? This _is_ me. I haven’t been alive like this since she left. I never thought I could feel this alive again. But I was missing something.”

Another crash from above, and Kirk can smell burnt ozone on the air.

“ _You,_ Jim,” McCoy breathes. Another step, and he’s close enough for Kirk to taste the sickly bilge on his breath. “It’s always been you. And I never should have waited this long.” His hand brushes Kirk’s arm, and he cringes away as the tendrils lap at his sleeve, searching for a means to penetrate the fabric. “We’ll need more,” McCoy decides. “More seeds to plant. One won’t be enough.” He leans into Kirk’s neck. A droplet of something wet trickles into the divot of Kirk’s throat, and he can’t tell if it’s the plant ooze or his own sweat. “Kiss me,” he says, and here they are again, like that first night in parlour, with Kirk’s back pressed to a wall. McCoy hums, and Kirk feels the reverberation in his own throat.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard, you puss-filled freak of nature,” he grits out, “but I do actually have standards.”

With one hand, he swings the flashlight in an arc. McCoy’s quick enough to dodge the blow, but Kirk’s already reaching down into the darkness, and before McCoy can regain his bearings he throws the tapestry over his face.

McCoy’s shrieks are muffled by the fabric as Kirk drags him tooth and nail across the floor, praying he hasn’t lost his direction in the dark. He doesn’t have a hand free to direct the light – both are occupied keeping the fabric taught.

The crunching of glass beneath his feet tells him he’s hit the mark and he drops, taking McCoy down with him. A shard cuts through his jeans to his skin and he gasps at the pain, but grits his teeth through it and fumbles until his fingers close around the broken picture frame. A quick smack against the hard ground finishes the job and the frame splinters in two, leaving a jagged spike in his hand.

The drop knocked the breath from McCoy, but he can hear him clawing at the fabric, trying to break free. Kirk flings himself onto his arm and pins it, but drops the flashlight in the process. It rolls until the side of McCoy’s face is illuminated. Any trace of a smile is gone. Instead, he wears of mask of nothing but rage.

“I’m sorry, Bones. I wish I could give you heaven. You deserve it.”

He grasps McCoy’s wrist and, with his eyes closed, brings the spike down into the centre of McCoy’s palm.

His aim is true, and as McCoy yells the thing shrivels and smokes, crumbling around the wood like dust.

Kirk yanks the spike out and grabs the light, pointing it at McCoy’s freed hand.

The plant is dead, plain to see. What remains of its shell is exactly the same as the ones left on the Enterprise: nothing but a husk of a once-living parasite. He throws the remains away in disgust.

“Bones?” he says. “Bones, it’s over-”

The weight of an arm against his windpipe knocks him over and he drops the light again, gripping the spike in both hands. McCoy straddles him and Kirk tries to sit up but a larger hand encircles his own, pushing the point down towards his heart.

McCoy has the leverage but Kirk has the grip, and as he strains he watches the other point climb closer and closer to McCoy’s chest.

A stalemate. If McCoy bears down, the stake will go straight through Kirk’s heart. If Kirk rears and topples McCoy, the momentum will carry them over and do the same.

Fight, or run?

The light flickers in McCoy’s eyes. He can’t hear the roar of the wind anymore, only their heavy breathing, hearts beating somehow in sync.

If he fights, he’ll have to hurt Bones to make him stop. If he runs, he’ll get a stake through the back.

“I didn’t know you back then,” Kirk grunts, straining to maintain his grip. McCoy’s expression doesn’t waver. “I can’t bring you back to that time. Too much has changed.”

Was that a hesitation, or just a trick of the shadows?

“But one thing hasn’t changed. It’s always going to be a part of you, no matter where you are, or what kind of life you live, or who you love.”

Kirk feels the wood begin to slip between too-sweaty palms.

Now or never.

“You’re a doctor,” he groans. There. Definitely a flicker, a sliver of confusion. He grins, triumphant. If there’s one thing James Kirk excels at, it’s finding the third option.

“You’re a doctor. And I don’t believe you’ll let me die.”

And with that, Kirk lets go.

The spike of wood plunges into his skin, and the world erupts into flames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am fully prepared for this to be a controversial set of revelations - even I was taken aback by how the tone shifted as I was writing the chapter (all in one feverish five-hour sitting) but it is what I intended it to be from the very beginning - if it's not to your taste, please forgive me! It's the only other scene I always knew I was going to include, other than the wedding fantasy scene a few chapters back. To be honest, I think I just really like writing creepy things, and that image of the rotting wedding dress in the dark cellar was one that wouldn't leave me alone.
> 
> Props to all you readers who recognized ahead of time that Kirk was a bit of an unreliable narrator - not trying to deceive the reader necessarily, but certainly trying to deceive himself. 
> 
> I'm planning to post the final two chapters in one go, so this is the penultimate update!! Thank you all for sticking with this crazy little story.


	28. Act 3 - Chapter 7

When Kirk wakes, it’s in pockets of fog, brief interludes of pain before he slips back into the blissful ether. In brief moments of lucidity, he takes in gnarled hands pressing imprints into his skin, scattered words spoken too softly to discern, and the roar of a train passing, then fading into the distance.

He opens his eyes to the glare of harsh sunlight on his face and he groans, blinking against the onslaught of abrupt brightness. Kirk tries to sit up but a hand pushes him back down.

“Stay still, damn it, do you want to bleed out?”

“Bones?” he asks blearily, scarcely daring to believe the voice, because it sounds _real_. He’d believed it before, hadn’t he?

“Welcome back to the land of the living, kiddo.”

He finally manages to pry his eyelids apart without feeling like his corneas are about to descend into his skull, and finds himself staring at a patch of blue sky through the open hatch. The axe is discarded on the top step of the upside-down stairs.

“That was a damn risky stunt you pulled,” McCoy mutters. “Yeah, let the evil plant man stab me, what a brilliant plan.”

“Worked, didn’t it?” he says, trying to laugh and deciding he’s never going to laugh again if it hurts that much. McCoy’s hand returns to press him back down, but it lingers on his forehead, smoothing his damp hair.

After a moment, McCoy catches himself, and he pulls his hand back quickly.

“How’d you manage to fix up a stake through the heart, by the way?” he asks. “Needle and twine?”

“If you’d taken a stake through the heart, you’d be dead. I’m a good doctor, but I’m not _that_ good, not in a hole like this.” He gestures vaguely around the room. Kirk glances down as far as his neck will let him.

He’s naked from the chest up. The skin is smeared with blood, but otherwise not much worse for wear. His shoulder, on the other hand, is wrapped in layer of white gauze. Splotches of red are beginning to peep through.

“I snapped out of it pretty much as soon as you got started yelling bloody murder. Guess that was enough of a shock to the system to clear the rest of the gunk out of my brain. So, thanks for that, I guess. Don’t ever do it again.”

He’s quite convinced that McCoy got halfway there on his own, and that it’s no accident the stake pierced his shoulder and not his heart, but he’ll save arguing that point for another day, when his head’s a little less foggy.

“Where’d you get the gauze?” he asks.

McCoy shrugs sheepishly, and when Kirk glances past him he sees the tattered remains of the wedding dress, its skirt ripped from the bodice and torn lengthwise into strips from the cleanest parts.

“Frontier medicine,” Kirk says, and McCoy snorts. “Sorry about the dress, though. I’m sure it meant a lot to you.” He leaves the _it_ ambiguous.

“Yeah, it did,” McCoy agrees. “Some things matter more.”

McCoy leaves when he’s sure that Kirk’s not about to slip into a coma, and returns with the proper medical kit Kirk had packed all those months ago. Sweet, sweet drugs flood Kirk’s system, and the pain fades to a dull ache that’s almost manageable. After a quick pass of various instruments, the wound is disinfected and sutured, and another hypospray gets his body working overtime on replacing the red blood cells he’s lost. The wonders of modern medicine.

“You ready to get out of here?”

“More than you’d believe,” he grunts, and gratefully accepts McCoy’s hand off the floor.

“Watch your step out there,” McCoy warns, and he’s about to ask what he means when he emerges from the cellar.

The house… ‘demolished’ is too kind a word. The roof is plain _gone_ , along with most of the top story, and what remains stands in ramshackle chunks around the main supports. What’s left of their garden is impossible to see under the layer of debris and fallen branches. Not even the trees have been spared: huge, century-old oaks are toppled and laying in latticework along the side of the yard.

“The kitchen’s mostly intact, but it’s still a holy miracle I managed to find that medkit. You better hope that your PADD survived, or else it’s going to be a long and painful walk to get us out of here.”

“That thing’s certified to stand -3000 Kelvin, I think it probably got through this ok.”

“Hope you’re right. As your doctor, I wouldn’t say that a ten mile hike is in your best interests at the moment.”

“Then can we rest a minute? Medical request,” he wheezes as a spasm grips his shoulder. McCoy hauls him over to a fallen log and he sits gratefully.

From this vantage, the damage feels even more absolute. There isn’t a part of the house left untouched.

“Bones, I’m sorry. About the house, and about… everything.”

McCoy sits beside him. The space between them has returned, and Kirk already misses its absence.

“I’m the one who should be sorry. Who just tried to kill who?” McCoy jokes without any humour.

“I let that _thing_ live inside of you,” he spits out, and McCoy’s expression fixes. “For _months_. And I believed it was you, just because it was telling me things I wanted to hear.”

“Jim-”

“It’s disgusting.” His stomach heaves at the thought of his own selfishness. He’d let himself believe McCoy was cured, and McCoy, trapped in his own body the whole time... “I let this happen, with something that wasn’t you-”

“It _was_ me.”

Kirk stops. McCoy is staring at his hands, mouth drawn tight. “Or, as much of me as it could get its vines into. Don’t you think it makes me sick too that it used me to manipulate you? Used everything I wanted to get to you?” He clenches his fists until his knuckles turn white. “Oh, I wanted, all right,” he says darkly.

“It wasn’t you,” Kirk reminds him, “it was the spores.”

“Yeah? Then how come every single other person on the crew snapped out of it, and this thing chose me to carry its seed halfway across the galaxy?” McCoy’s voice is thick with self-recrimination. “I wanted all of this. Used to dream about it. Coming back here, setting up the house again. Somehow convincing you to stay. And that’s what I’d always tell myself, right? That if we were here, I could get back to how it used to be. I could stop being so jaded and learn how to be happy again, like Joselyn and I were for all those years.” He laughs bitterly. “Disgusting is the right word. I ruined this place for her, it was only a matter of time before I ruined it for you too.”

There’s more left unsaid about what happened between him and Joselyn, the years they’d shared in this house, but now isn’t the time. He can ask later. For now, he needs McCoy to understand-

“I wanted it too,” Kirk says. McCoy twitches at his side. “That’s not something you manipulated out of me. I wanted this life more than I could stand. So much that I lost my head to get it. A home and my best friend, getting to live my life with someone who actually wants me around? How the hell could I turn that down?” He takes a deep breath. “But I think… I was chasing something impossible too. And I let you get hurt because I couldn’t see that. And that’s why I’m sorry,” he finishes lamely. “But I’ve got you back now, and that’s all that matters.”

Bones doesn’t respond, and Kirk doesn’t look at him to see what expression he’s wearing. They both sit and listen to the breeze whistle, and survey the wreckage of what they’d tried to build.

Kirk’s eyes drift to the corner of the collapsed porch. Peeking out from the splintered wood he can make out the corner of the hope chest. Against all odds, its tulips are unblemished, and a thought rises to the top of Kirk’s mind. A terrible idea. A terrifying, terrible idea. But it’s been a day for those, and after all, isn’t that his specialty?

“When we were at Blackfield, after the picnic, you were describing your wedding to Jocelyn, right?” McCoy makes a pained sound and looks ready to interrupt with another apology, but Kirk barrels on. “But that wasn’t all of it. You didn’t say it in so many words, but you were proposing, weren’t?”

“Please, don’t-”

“Leonard McCoy. Will you, of sound mind and sound heart, marry me?”

He tries to slide down on one knee to complete the gesture, but thinks better of it when his shoulder begins to protest.

Bones looks shell-shocked, his mouth gaping like a fish on dry land.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Dead serious.”

“I tried to murder you not six hours ago!”

“And then you fixed me right up! It’s a match made in-” he catches himself before he can say ‘heaven’, “-in history!”

McCoy scrubs a palm over his mouth and stares at Kirk in wonder. “You… you absolute idiot, you really mean it, don’t you?”

“I really, really do.”

Bones snorts incredulously, but his eyes are bright. “Jim, if you marry me, better make it far from here. I think we both have enough memories of this place now to last us a lifetime.”

“Bones, when we’re ready, I’ll marry you anywhere. I’ll marry you here, or on the Enterprise, or in the middle of a spaceport. And I mean that, I really do.

“But when you’re old and grey and we’ve had enough adventures to last a lifetime, let’s come back here and rebuild this house. Spock can come visit on the weekends, and we’ll all hike out to the mountains and you can annoy each other by having totally different camping styles.”

Bones sighs. “You’ve gotta understand… there’s nothing but bad blood here. There’s a reason I never told you any of this, Jim.”

“Was it a lie, what you told me about your grandmother, when we first moved in?” Kirk wheedles. “About husking peas, and mixing drinks, and curling up under quilts and watching the stars?”

“Now, don’t you-”

“You love Georgia. Don’t you try to deny that. It’s in your bones, and I can see it on your face. Your body called you to this house when it needed a paradise. I just can’t believe there’s nothing left here for you.”

Bones still looks unconvinced, but if they’re going to have a lifetime together, that’s plenty of time to persuade him.

The day dawns brightest the day after a storm, and they wait under clear blue skies for the emergency team to lock on their position. Kirk shifts until he’s close enough to lay his head on McCoy’s shoulder. There’s not a hint of space between them. This’ll be their last chance to breathe fresh air, before Starfleet subjects them to any number of medical tests and they endure debriefings in stuffy boardrooms and finally, the Enterprise arrives back at Earth to pick them up.

To bring them home.


	29. Epilogue

Replicator coffee is trash. Always has been, always will be. Kirk chugs it anyway and tosses the cup into the disposal. Chekov waves at him from the corner of the mess hall and he pretends not to see, none too eager to get caught up in a long conversation when he’s finally, _finally_ off shift.

He still finds his feet wandering sometimes back along a more familiar path through the corridors. Sometimes he’ll step from the turbolift and realize he’s gotten off two floors too early for where he needs to be. But as he traces the route to Bones’ door, he finds this walk feels more welcoming than the path to his own quarters ever did.

The room is just the way he left it this morning. Books stacked against the wall, a few uniform shirts draped over the bed, a pair of antique glasses on the vanity, playing cards and a bottle of gin.

They don’t room together, not according to official Starfleet records. But as long as Kirk is Captain, he figures the administration won’t notice one more unfiled report under the heap of ones he still owes. It’s not on record, but Spock knows to ping McCoy’s intercom if he wants to reach Kirk after hours, which makes it pretty damn official in his books.

 

Bones won’t be off for another three hours. He’s been working split-shifts lately, trying to get a handle on some new bioorganic study he’s been running in his back lab. When he gets back, Kirk will get up and settle into the bed – _their_ bed – properly, but for now his eyes are burning and he needs to take the edge off the last 16 hours of mayhem.

There’s a blanket waiting for him on the corner of the couch. There always is. He grabs it and settles into the cushions for a well-deserved nap. His bleary eyes focus on the picture frame on the table for only a moment before he drifts off. The image there follows him into his dreams: a shifting vision of burnished sand, two silver rings held up to the light, and nothing but blue skies above.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all folks! I decided it was better to post the last chapter and the epilogue as a bundle - didn't feel right to make everyone wait half a week for such a short conclusion :) Everyone gets a (sort of) happy ending! Honestly, there's a chapter missing in here between the last chapter and the epilogue where Kirk and Bones sit down and hash out all the trauma that undoubtedly came out of this whole scenario and have a good long chat about many things, but I'm leaving that as an exercise to the reader, as after a year and a half spent working on this story I don't quite have the energy to do the additional one-shot atm. Just assume that such conversations did happen in the interim.
> 
> Thank you again for everyone who came along on this ride! It's been a privilege to read all your comments, and hopefully you enjoyed this crazy mess of a story, and there are things that would be interesting on a re-read! I tried to drop many hints along the way towards "someone, namely Bones and Jocelyn, lived here for a time after Bones' grandmother passed on" but I don't think a lot of them would make much sense without the context of the last few chapters. 
> 
> For anyone who's very confused about why Kirk was ok with staying behind for the majority of Act 3 and not fighting to get back to his ship - I was basing that characterization on two things: Kirk's professed interest in leaving Starfleet during the beginning of Star Trek: Beyond, and my own experience with how much _any_ escape looks inviting when your job stresses you out that much, even if you know that you're making bad decisions along the way. Kirk spent a lot of Act 3 lying to himself both about what he wanted and how much he believed Bones' assurances that he was alright, because it was easier than dealing with the intersection of his other stressors. Hopefully, for all its messed-up ness, this little vacation helps Kirk manage his work/life balance better in the future.

**Author's Note:**

> You may have noticed I finally set the number of total chapters at the top. Things will only start to accelerate from here :)


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